by James Calder, Pimlico Wilde
I have read with admiration, and no small amount of sympathy, the Pre-Abstractionist Manifesto. One cannot deny its force, nor its passion. The authors write with the urgency of those who feel their medium has lost its way, and in this, they join a long and noble tradition. Every century, perhaps every decade, art requires its prophets, its reformers, its refusers.
There is truth in what they say. The rupture of abstraction, beginning with Kandinsky, crystallising with Malevich and Mondrian, and later hardening into the orthodoxies of mid-century formalism, was indeed violent. One recalls Hans Hofmann’s remark that “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” But what, pray, if one person’s “unnecessary” is another’s beloved? The Pre-Abstractionists are right to remind us that in the name of “purity,” much of life was declared extraneous.
History, too, gives weight to their protest. Consider Delacroix, who wrote that “the first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.” Representation, at its best, offers precisely that: the feast of recognition, the banquet of form wedded to meaning. In this light, abstraction could appear as a starvation diet, a denial of appetite.
And yet,I cannot follow them to their conclusion. To call abstraction “a mistake” is to erase too much, to reduce a complex inheritance to a single, dismissive stroke. Can we really say that Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow contains less terror or beauty than “a single blade of grass”? Perhaps not terror, perhaps not beauty as they define it,but surely rhythm, structure, balance: qualities that are equally inexhaustible.
Art’s history is not a straight line, but a dialogue, often quarrelsome, between competing visions of truth. The Pre-Abstractionists seek to re-establish the visible world as art’s lodestar. Fair enough. But their rejection of abstraction is too absolute. If Cézanne could see in Mont Sainte-Victoire both a mountain and the architecture of sensation itself, should we not permit both readings to coexist?
I cannot agree that abstraction was a “mistake.” It was a discovery,perhaps a dangerous one, perhaps one that led to excesses, but a discovery nonetheless. It opened a field of possibilities that continues to nourish artists today, just as figurative painting continues to do. To deny either is to impoverish the conversation.
So I salute the fervour of the Pre-Abstractionists. They remind us, as every manifesto ought, that art is not polite, not neutral, but a matter of belief and conviction. Still, as an art dealer, as a custodian of a more catholic taste, I must decline their invitation to renunciation. To borrow from Whitman: abstraction contradicts representation, abstraction contains representation, abstraction is large, it contains multitudes.
James Calder
Pimlico Wilde
