MONDRIAN AND THE ISSUE OF RELATIONSHIPS
WITH THE COMMITMENT OF A MONK or a saint, Mondrian devoted his life to an art in which particular forms were gradually abolished in order to reveal pure relationships. Equivalent but unequal oppositions of vertical and horizontal lines, primary colors, black, white, and neutrals, he believed, could manifest the dynamic equilibrium of opposites that lay behind the particular forms of nature, and a universal reality above time, space, and the oppressions of ordinary life. This symbolistic geometry, when projected by the art and activities of Mondrian and the de Stijl painters, sculptors, architects, and designers into the social sphere, postulated a technological utopia and resulted in a dominant international esthetic that combined mysticism with utilitarianism.
We revere Mondrian as the greatest geometric abstract painter, but attempts to maintain the viability of his formal and metaphysical principles without fundamental change, as in the “structurist reliefs” of Charles Biederman and his followers, are patently academic.1 Except for the perennial idea of complementarity, the modernist critics and artists of the ’60s tacitly dismissed Mondrian’s divinations as theosophical baloney, along with a larger cluster of ideas now regarded as exploded myths.2
Among the formal redirections of modernism during the last two decades, none are more central than those involving relationship: part to part and to whole, image to framing edge, limitation and extension, closure and openness, difference and sameness, optical movement and stasis, and even the need in art for any internal relations or unification whatsoever. In New York the dialectic that accompanied these changes, and separated Abstract Expressionists from abstract imagists (or color field painters) and their successors, seemed to assume that Mondrianesque and Cubist relationality were the only variety: to be anti-Cubist or anti-Mondrian was to be antirelational. This we know is not the case, for the formal history of art is a sequence of differing relational modes. Just as a comparative osteologist can interpret the evolution of vertebrates by studying skeletons, a form historian can decipher meaningful structural redirections hidden beneath the muscular tissue of art works. Mondrian made this task easier by defleshing his painting down to its barest bones. The greatest and purest relationalist, his art was the fulcrum on which the issue of formal relations turned at mid-century.3
The primary achievement of the avant-garde during the ’30s was the assimilation of Cubism. Scarcely secondary was a similar internalization of the Dionysian side of European modernism. 1936 was an important year: Alfred Barr organized “Cubism and Abstract Art” and “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art, and the American Abstract Artists group was founded. Two years earlier Burgoyne Diller and Harry Holtzman, who traveled to Paris to meet Mondrian, had become his advocates. But the second-wave influence of Cubism had begun still earlier, and underlay the art of Gorky, de Kooning, and David Smith as well as that of Stuart Davis and Ad Reinhardt. After 1945 “Cubism,” as a disputed concept in New York, conformed—but only very generally—to the early practice of Picasso and Braque. Although he had earlier objected to a lack of human identification in Mondrian’s geometric painting, in 1952 Motherwell identified the “moral ideal” of Abstract Expressionism as, simply, “Mondrian,” and the “esthetic ideal” as a “looser form of 1911 Cubism.”4 The image was apt, but did not take account of the tendency, already established, to avoid triangular, gravitational composition. By 1912 Mondrian had almost obliterated bottom heaviness and had reduced his motifs to vestigial phantoms. The Tree series of 1909–1912, and the works that followed shortly afterward, are the best developmental paradigm of what “Cubism” meant for Abstract Expressionist painters: a translucent picture plane, oscillating space, a contained image, and a relational core. Even when separable units were all but obliterated by brush manipulation, the archetypical Abstract Expressionist work remained a constellation of qualities (if not of elements) magnetically distributed around a central area. With roots in Cézanne’s still lifes and landscapes, this centrality was surely an unrecognized survival from one-point perspective. And better than any textbook illustration such pictures as de Kooning’s Attic or Excavation exemplify what the psychologist Kurt Koffka described as the “good Gestalt,” which “not only makes its own boundaries, but also within its boundaries rules and determines its parts in a sort of hierarchy, giving this a central position.”5 Mondrian’s connection with Abstract Expressionism, it has been demonstrated, was just as close, if less immediately evident, as it was to painting in the de Stijl tradition. The acceptance or rejection of asymmetrical relationality, that is to say, was a more crucial issue than either a primary palette or geometricity.
The opposition of openness to closure is one of the most instructive criteria of 20th-century pictorial and sculptural composition. For the Cubo-Futurist years it serves to establish an inherent distinction between Kahnweiler’s Cubists, whose work was securely contained, and Delaunay, Orphism, and the centrifugal expansiveness of the Italians. Mondrian dealt with closure and openness simultaneously. When color areas in the works of the ’20s and ’30s are terminated by the edge of the panel rather than a black bar, they usually imply continuation beyond it. Perhaps to compensate, certain bars stop short just before the edge. As Max Bill has observed, the so-called Lozenges—squares poised on one corner—are more open than the rectangular pictures.6 They resemble carefully composed cutouts from larger structures. Composition with Yellow Lines (1933) is an ultimate statement of this obviously intentional paradox. It is a diagonally placed white square, crossed near each corner by a yellow band. The four bands, two vertical and two horizontal, do not intersect, nor can they link securely outside the canvas, being unequal both in thickness and placement. And in addition to opening the composition, as Hans Jaffe says, “this is the way in which Mondrian goes about making good his 1926 avowal: ‘all symmetry must be excluded.’” (For several reasons the term “composition,” which both Mondrian and Kandinsky used in their titles, was disliked even in the ’40s. In the ’60s it became intolerable, not only because of overuse and its earlier application to representational art, but also because of its association with European modernism and closed asymmetry.) The terms “open” and “closed,” it should be unnecessary to state, are relative; both serve to designate a variety of quite different alternatives. Mondrian’s calculated adjustment of containment to expansion, though magnified by Franz Kline, seems constrained after the flexible height or breadth of Newman’s canvases, Still’s raw-edged, knifed surfaces, Pollock’s physiological expansion of the pictorial field, or Louis’ veils. The embracing space of Monet’s expansive late Water Lilies, which appeared in New York in the mid-’50s, marks the ultimate degree of Impressionist openness. The works of these artists constituted an explosion that was later to reverberate in larger works, shaped canvases, a redefinition of sculpture, environments, happenings, multi-media, earthworks, and process art. Heinrich Woelfflin would have an epileptic fit in his grave if he could see how far one pole of his third principle has been extended.
Symmetry, a mode of organization deplored by Mondrian because he found it to be equal and static rather than equivalent and dynamic, is high on the list of alternative relational solutions adopted during the ’60s; yet the term, with its atavistic associations, seems inadequate to encompass the many ways in which confronting portions of a structure can be identical. Repetition has been just as prevalent. Redundant, systematic, and modular structures now permeate technology, art, architecture, and indeed, every facet and aspect of the urban environment. Yet, although a scattering of prototypical instances can be found, symmetry and overall homogeneity are rare before the ’50s. (Michel Seuphor’s book Abstract Painting, published in 1961, reproduces only one work that is fully symmetrical—an Albers—and none that are uniformly patterned. These illustrations document the spread of Mondrianesque asymmetrical relationality.) Balla’s Iridescent Interpenetrations—backgammon-board wedges of pure and pale colors—are as conspicuous in 1912 for their bilateral symmetry as they are for their optical colorism. Delaunay’s Disks are also exceptions, as are Malevich’s circle, square, and cross—the archetypes of Reinhardt’s black pictures. The critical juncture for asymmetry occurred around 1950, though Joseph Albers’ Biconjugate series, in which one lateral sector reverses the other, originated before 1940 and Homage to the Square in 1949. In 1952 Reinhardt returned to hard edges and flat tones, this time symmetrically,, and by then Rothko settled on soft-edge, essentially symmetrical rectangles (which, characteristically, he insisted were asymmetrical). In all of these works the image is separated from the framing edge and securely contained by it. By utter contrast, the single raveled track down the center of Newman’s Onement pictures that appeared first in an untitled drawing of 1946, parallels the right and left edges of the rectangle, but—like the surrounding “void” (a word used in a 1946 title)—it is in no way constrained in its implication of limitless extension by any of the four edges.
Symmetry and repetition overlap. Overall calligraphic treatment of a surface, in which a perspectival or Cubist infrastructure was usually buried, was initiated by Tobey before 1940. Its implicit subversion of focused asymmetry was widely discussed after 1947, when Pollock began to pour enamel and Tomlin and Reinhardt to work in an overall free-brush manner.7 That symmetry is a form of repetition is especially evident a decade later in the paintings and constructions of the “New Tendency” and “Programmed Art” groups active all over Europe from 1959 until the mid-’60s. Much earlier, again in 1946, Bill asymmetrically relieved a uniform pattern of 81 small, dark squares by shifting to white for only one of them. And as the emphasis of the Constructivist tradition became perceptual rather than symbolistically structural or “pure,” its adherents learned, as did the American Op artists, that asymmetry was seldom consonant with their depersonalized and implicitly cybernetic aims. In 1962 Vasarely gave me a book for which he had designed the cover, Aesthetische Redundanz by Kurd Alsleben. In one chart it illustrates more than 50 ways to divide a square that are either repetitive, systemic, centered, or simply unequal (which is not to say asymmetrical).8 Alsleben’s book, in fact, includes most of the regular schemes that underlie the so-called nonrelational art of the ’60s: circles, crosses, stars, unequal but nonsymmetrical divisions, overall and alternating patterns, grids, and nets; horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines and stripes, etc.
In the Façades, and the Pier and Ocean series that culminated in 1917 with the entirely abstract Composition with Lines, Mondrian came close to both symmetry and overall notation. This unique picture was used in 1965 by A. Michael Noll of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in one of the first attempts at cybernetic art, when he programmed a digital computer and microfilm plotter to generate compositions similar to Composition with Lines, but of greater and lesser variety or uniformity.9 The more systemic Lozenge with Gray Lines, painted in 1918, suggests a “New Tendency” grid despite slight variations. The two checkerboard compositions of the next year are as mechanical as a tiled floor, though the placement of colors seems entirely intuitive. But had Mondrian extended this tendency, he could himself have become an arch antirelationist. John Coplans has called attention to Ellsworth Kelly’s similar modular composition done in Paris in 1951—an eight-foot square assembled from 64 one-foot-square canvases, each painted a single flat color. During that same year Kelly also painted a wide, protocybernetic panel, Seine, in which a transverse tonal gradation—white to black and back again—is achieved by random binary reversals of a small rectangular module from black to white. In 1952 he turned, as Coplans says, to “a highly symmetrical organization, sometimes bilateral (in both color and form) and at other times coaxial (that is, vertically, horizontally and diagonally symmetrical, e.g., a square or a circle).”10
A visual gestalt has commonly been held to lie somewhere between a mosaic and a lump. I have therefore been puzzled to find that term applied to such works as Judd’s most primary objects, Morris’ boxes, and Tony Smith’s six-foot cube Die, expressly to indicate their instantly apparent, unitary homogeneity. For Wertheimer, Koehler, Koffka, and Arnheim, a gestalt is a distribution of unequal parts or forces that together comprise a stressed unity.11 What we have witnessed in the reductive, minimal, optical, and systemic art of the ’60s is, precisely, the disintegration and absorption of the relational gestalt image under many environmental pressures, both constructive and subversive. Abstract art has been assimilated by new perceptual, philosophical, and technological systems, and artists born after 1935 see very differently from their predecessors.
It would be shortsighted in assessing this change not to recognize that relational principles reflect attitudes, content, and process, and that a major shift seldom occurs on only one level. From Picasso, Tatlin, and Schwitters to Mondrian, Motherwell, and Rauschenberg, the “mode of juxtaposition” has always involved a series of intuitive decisions and often anguishing revisions, the outcome of which—the gestalt—is learned only at the moment of completion. To just the degree that a work is preplanned or systematized, such creative stress is precluded. Or, in a median process, if a habitual formula such as nested squares, parallel stripes, or a grid is adopted, decisions and revisions made in progress can be limited to one dimension of the work, usually color.
Among the many alternatives to relational asymmetry is a process I shall call “open accretion.” As painters who employ shaped and modular canvases use it, free proliferation of form is controlled by preliminary studies, and the mode is perhaps better fitted for three-dimensional expansion. Several sculptors have worked in this way—including David Smith in a few late works such as Cubi XXllI—but Anthony Caro is its best-known advocate. His steel elements (or those of other artists who proceed in this way) enter the context of the work as unique formal events. Each assertion, added to those that preceded it, provides a launching point for the next. Unification is rhythmic—the outcome of a chain or network of consonant and dissonant gestures—and has little in common with gestalt delimitation. Tony Smith has combined nonsymmetry and open accretion with a tetrahedral system; Snelson allows his tensegrity structures to crystallize freely; after 1967 Rosati opened his geometric sculpture, initially closed and Cubist, to potentially meandering proliferation. An open additive procedure retains both variation and the undetermined sequence of decisions based on emotion, sensibility, and intuition, and is as free of conceptual and systemic constraint as it is of Cubist closure.
Jasper Johns’ paintings and objects done between 1954 and 1962 offer one index to a radical change in content and form that is already history. On the level of content, these annihilative works withered the overextended existential pretensions and the self-absorbed process of Abstract Expressionism; on another, they subverted relational asymmetry by a series of devices, among them allover “impressionist” brushwork, symmetry, mechanical centrality, ironically imprinted images of flags, targets, and other stereotypes, repetition, and arbitrary number and letter systems. These counterinnovations only begin the inventory of antirelational and newly relational modes of the ’60s. They are now common and far too numerous to list conveniently.
In Cézanne’s watercolors, as Kurt Badt wrote in 1956, a painter for the first time “created relationships of a type completely independent of objects.”12 Some 40 years later, in a new historical context but a continuing tradition, the same statement could have been made of Mondrian. Basing his art on nature as did Cézanne, Mondrian more than once carried this mode of relationality not only to complete abstraction but almost to the point of dissolution. The sequence of innovations and counterinnovations through which interrelational abstract art was dispersed, congealed, or absorbed by postasymmetrical systems followed several paths. If the succession of significant redirections in art proceeded in a unilateral, even an orderly way, one might have concluded by 1968 that the technological society Mondrian awaited had annihilated interrelational abstract painting and sculpture for all time. But the artist, who can be a counterhistorian, does not respect extrapolation. Few modes (among them literalistic realism) have been permanently abandoned. The passage of art does not follow a narrow “mainstream” but is dialectical. It moves in spurts, retakes, and spirals; it contracts and expands. The statement that, after a century, asymmetrical relationality has run its course would have a certain panache, and it may even turn out to be true. But like most sweeping judgments, it would also be incautious.13
William C. Seitz is William R. Kenan Professor of History of Art at the University of Virginia, and currently Kress Professor in Residence, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered at a symposium on Piet Mondrian’s life, work, and influence held during the Mondrian centennial exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on October 9, 1971.
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NOTES
1. Biederman’s idiosyncratic and polemical ideas are of interest in surveying the history of relational and symbolistic abstract art. See The New Cézanne: From Monet to Mondrian, Minnesota, 1958, and Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, Minnesota, 1948. For the structuralist relief (and a Biederman bibliography) see Charles Biederman: The Structurist Relief: 1935–1964, Minneapolis, 1965; also The Structurist, a journal edited by Eli Bornstein at the University of Saskatchewan.
2. See Robert Welsh, “Mondrian and Theosophy” and other essays included in the catalogue of the Guggenheim Museum’s 1971 Mondrian exhibition. Among the leading younger artists who have expressed their rejection of Cubist asymmetry, relationality, and Mondrian are Stella, Judd, Flavin, and Morris. In a round of interviews generated by the Newman exhibition that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in December, 1971, Judd recalled that his main objection to Mondrian’s paintings concerned “the relational elements and just the quality of it, the pure and ideal.” (Art News, October, 1971, p. 46) And in a 1964 radio interview both Stella and Judd identified Mondrian with relational art, which they saw as an obsolete European tradition. (See Bruce Glaser, “On Stella and Judd,” in Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology, New York, 1968, pp. 148–64.) One of Stella’s answers (p. 149) will suffice to epitomize their attitude:
The other thing is that the European geometric painters really strive for what I call relational painting. The basis of their whole idea is balance. You do something in one corner and you balance it with something in the other corner. Now the “new painting” is being characterized as symmetrical. Ken Noland has put things in the center and I’ll use a symmetrical pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It’s nonrelational. In the newer American painting we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn’t important. We’re not trying to jockey everything around.
Drawing from his early Catholic training, Flavin has expressed concurrence with the heretical nominalism of William of Occam, which rejected the validity of metaphysical truth, and in 1966 he dedicated a fluorescent construction, Greens Crossing Greens, “to Piet Mondrian, who lacked green.” (Artforum, December, 1966, p. 29.) This was a reference, it would appear, to Mondrian’s distaste for the color of trees which developed after his naturalistic periods. Morris, in the first of four “Notes on Sculpture” (Artforum, February, 1966, p. 44) characterizes “complex irregular polyhedrons” as “weak gestalts” that “seem to return one to the conditions of works which, in Mondrian’s terms, transmit relations easily in that their parts separate,” and in his second installment of the “Notes” (Artforum, October, 1966, p. 21) refers back to his discussion of “the use of a strong gestalt or of unitary-type forms to avoid divisiveness and set the work beyond retardataire Cubist esthetics . . . .” It is a measure of Mondrian’s greatness that his art still provides a dialectical focus. By contradicting his principles, the new geometric artists confirmed his ubiquitous presence. At the same time, for a variety of reasons, other artists accepted Mondrian—among them George Segal, whose environmental sculpture embraced rectilinear placements and asymmetrical relationality, and Larry Poons, who responded to a dual influence of the optical vibration of Mondrian’s New York pictures and Newman’s large areas of saturated color. (See “Larry Poons: Untitled,” Cleveland Museum Bulletin, April, 1970, pp. 118-22.)
3. Under the influence of Clement Greenberg and British linguistic philosophy, the formalist critics of the ’60s added greatly to the literature of art, but they also carried the verbalized observation and examination of art objects to questionable extremes of phenomenological and syntactical nuance, and sometimes to opaque rhetoric, which did a disservice by ignoring content (the existence of which, for all intents and purposes, they denied) as well as the stated opinions and beliefs of artists concerning their own works and intentions. As a result the first-generation artists they most admired — notably Pollock, Still, Rothko, Newman, Hofmann, and David Smith — were subjected, as it were, to both lobotomy and hysterectomy. In the interest of a theory of criticism the objects these masters of the ’50s produced were torn from their social and experiential setting and separated from the emotions, concepts, and ideas of which they were the outcome. The short-lived art school that preceded Club 35 in 1948 was pointedly called “The Subjects of the Artist.” Content and process, not form, was what (with the exception of the didactic writings of Hofmann) these artists were willing to talk about. Between formalist and contextualist criticism, it sometimes appeared, the essential duality of art was bifurcated by New York art politics. The theoretical justification for this surgery, as Greenberg advanced it (Artforum, October, 1967, p. 39) was that content remains “indefinable, unparaphraseable [sic] undiscussable,” and that, anyway, “quality,” “form,” “effect,” and “content” were really the same thing.
In a few familiar, repeatedly reprinted statements, Still and Rothko expressed their hostility toward history, tradition, and, either explicitly or by implication, geometric abstraction and formalist criticism. Anyone who knew Rothko, or even talked with him casually, was aware of his unwillingness to discuss his art in either art historical or formalistic language. The following conversation, even though recorded by Selden Rodman, a detractor of abstract art, is entirely consistent with Rothko’s privately and publicly expressed viewpoint:
“You’re an abstractionist to me,” I [Rodman) said. “You’re a master of color harmonies and relationships on a monumental scale. Do you deny that?”
“I do. I’m not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else.”
“Then what is it you’re expressing?”
“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on —and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions. . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!” From Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1957, pp. 93-94.
Rodman also reports, in The Insiders (Baton Rouge, 1960, p. 34), Newman saying, at his French and Company exhibition in 1959, “I’ve licked Mondrian; I’ve killed the diagram.” Newman objected to Mondrian’s geometry and purism, Harold Rosenberg quotes him as writing, because “the geometry (perfection) swallows up his metaphysics (his exaltation).” (The Anxious Object, New York, p. 169.) And as Thomas Hess confirms, Newman’s title Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue is a good-natured challenge to the domination of geometric abstraction by Mondrian and the de Stijl esthetic. Quite aside from the theme of the Stations of the Cross that Newman chose for his series of 1958-1966, Hess’ identification of the “zip” with the idea of God, ridiculed by John Canaday (The New York Times, October 24, 1971, Sec. 2, p. 21) is worthy of serious consideration as the culmination of a long historical sequence. Cézanne was a devout Catholic, whose worship of nature has been held (for example by Kurt Badt, see fn. 12 below) to have a direct connection with religious belief; Cézanne’s sister Marie was a religious fanatic. The metaphysical idealism of the modernist tradition, which includes Klee’s naturalist philosophy, Mondrian’s and Kandinsky’s theosophy,and the eclectic idealism of Hofmann, could be seen to mark phases in the diffusion of religious belief on the part of intuitive, intensely aware, yet unscientific minds. In the catalogue of the 1966 exhibition “Systemic Painting,” a valuable account of the dissolution of Abstract Expressionism, Lawrence Alloway observed that its autobiographical and gestural character “lessened the prestige of art as a mirror of the absolute” as it was regarded in the theory of Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian, and added that “in New York there is little reliance on Platonic or Pythagorean mysteries.” (P. 17.) Essentially, of course, the sometimes pretentious “mysticism” of Still, Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman was cultural and psychological rather than religious, and resulted from self-elevation rather than (as was the case with Cézanne and Mondrian) the ego-dissolving idea of the prior reality of nature. The fact that the modernist artists of the ’60s scrapped this romantic baggage (or perhaps just left it in the checkroom) could mark the final demise of religious belief, however diffuse, as a justification for art and humanist ethics. Newman’s gesture—his splitting of the rock—might in this light be seen, as could his Stations of the Cross, as a last, egoistic, God-like gesture made at the cold dawn of a world which will be wholly God-less.
In one way or another, the ideas of the first-generation New York painters were saturated with associational content. Their separation into two groups, although not sufficiently demonstrable to be unequivocally maintained, has been accepted by consensus. The issue of gestural painting is important in this division, but below it the gut distinction concerned relationships, Cubism, geometry, and Mondrian. The text of this paper was written before the confrontation, in concurrent exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, of Mondrian and Newman—of the old geometry and the new. This accidental congruence recalled with a special drama that it was Mondrian whom Newman himself had “confronted” and of whom he wrote in 1947 that “no matter how formally pure his abstraction, [Mondrian] created a diagrammatic world which is the geometric equivalent for the seen landscape, the vertical trees on a horizon, and we are brought into the world of material purity through a representational depiction of its mathematical equivalents. A ninety-degree angle is a known natural image.” (Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman, New York, 1969, p. 37.) In a sharply honed report on the Newman exhibition (New York, November 8, 1971, pp. 80–84) Barbara Rose’s attention converged on the “dialectical thesis-antithesis tension” between Newman and Mondrian:
If we substitute Mondrian’s name for that of Euclid, we may better understand the battle Newman fought to find some avenue of escape from geometric painting that would nonetheless preserve the strict classical quality of geometric art. We can assume that Newman did a lot of thinking during the forties and that much of that thought was about Mondrian. The ghost of Mondrian seems to haunt Newman’s career, a silent specter with whom Newman kept on a life-long shadowboxing match. Newman’s initial attack on Mondrian was to challenge the Dutch abstractionist’s idea that painting was based on relationships. In the sixties, Newman’s works were popularly described by artists who saw something new in them as “non-relational,” because they were not composed in terms of the relationships of shapes linking the paintings to each other. Actually the term “non-relational” is a misnomer; there is a single but crucial relationship in Newman’s work. That is the relationship of the band or “zip,” as he called the slivers of color that streaked across his canvases, to its framing edge.
The Museum of Modern Art’s publication on the occasion of the recent Newman exhibition, by Thomas Hess, which I saw in galley proof just in time to add this note, goes far beyond any previous publication in documenting Newman’s art and ideas, and deals thoroughly with his rejection of the Cézannist tradition, as well as his concept of the Sublime. An extensive bibliography is included. The association of mystical ideas with the crisis of relationality was treated earlier, also with documentation, by Bernhard Kerber: “Der Ausdruck des Sublimen in der Amerikanischen Kunst,” Art International, Christmas, 1969, pp. 31–36.
4. These comments were incorporated in a rapidly composed, unpublished diagram of New York School inter relationships and influences.
5. K. Koffka, “Problems in the Psychology of Art,” in Art: A Symposium, Bryn Mawr College, 1940, p. 247. See also fn. 12.
6. See Max Bill, “Composition I with Blue and Yellow, 1925 by Piet Mondrian,” in the catalogue of the Guggenheim Mondrian exhibition. A similar article by Bill, as John Elderfield has noted, appeared in 1956. Elderfield has a somewhat different interpretation of this composition, emphasizing the roughly octagonal central area. See “Geometric Abstract Painting and Paris in the Thirties,” Artforum, May, 1970, p. 58.
7. William Rubin dealt exhaustively with this style in “Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition, Part III,” Artforum, April, 1967, pp. 18–31. He gives many other examples, and offers valuable insights into its connections with Impressionism and Mondrian’s pictures of 1913–15.
8. Kurd Alsleben, Aesthetische Redundanz, Hamburg, 1962, pp. 78–79.
9. A. Michael Noll, “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Compositions with Lines’ (1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture,” The Psychological Record, January, 1966, pp. 1–10. A reproduction of Mondrian’s picture and one by the computer were then submitted, under controlled conditions, to the judgment of a carefully chosen audience. Only 28% of the subjects identified the computer picture, but 59% preferred it.
10. John Coplans, “The Earlier Work of Ellsworth Kelly,” Artforum, Summer, 1969, p. 52.
11. The now famous example of Christian von Ehrenfels—proposed in his article “Uber Gestaltqualitäten” (1890), more than two decades before the establishment of Gestalt psychology—was a melody for it could be recognized in any key: relationships rather than specific notes determine its character. Koehler, like Koffka, sees Gestalten as organized functional wholes resulting from a dynamic distribution of parts or qualities, and gives the example of a “simple electric circuit.” (Gestalt Psychology, New York, 1947, p. 136.) Wertheimer: “What happens to a part of a whole is determined by intrinsic laws inherent to the whole.” (Quoted in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, New York, 1967, vol. III, p. 318.) Arnheim: “To call a football team a painting or an electric circuit a Gestalt is to describe a property of their organization. Gestalten function as wholes, which determine their parts. Four musicians who form a string quartet [an image that suggests a Cézanne still life or a Cubist collage] will create a unified style of performance.” (“Gestalt Psychology and Artistic Form,” in L. L. Whyte, Aspects of Form, New York, 1966, p. 196.) The most extended attempt to warp the accepted and very useful application of the term “Gestalt” to art was made by Robert Morris in his four “Notes on Sculpture.” (See fn. 2.) His observations on the character, presence, or absence of relationships are of interest, and an argument ’can be made for an extended range of “weak,” “strong,” “good,” “bad,” or even, perhaps, monadic Gestalten. But it serves little purpose as communication to twist a meaning until it connotes the absence of its constituent elements.
12. Kurt Badt, The Art of Cézanne, London, 1965, p. 39. Originally published in Munich in 1956 as Die Kunst Cézannes.
13. The tone of my concluding paragraph, cautious in the first version, was made more so in the second, in consideration of exhibitions, that coincided with those of Mondrian and Newman, of new work by Stella and Noland. Both groups of work were asymmetrical and relational, as the writers of articles on the two shows (Elizabeth Baker on Stella in the November Art News and Darby Bannard on Noland in the November Artforum) conceded. In both shows, moreover, the premises of previous “nonrelational” painting were contradicted by new work. The questions raised by this quadruple concurrence—not only that of relationships, but also of “forward” historical movement as against reformulation and how it bears on the judgment of this work in particular and the more general connection of innovation to quality—were not answered last October, but for the issue of relationships it was a surely a month worth remembering.
