What Abstraction Tells Us

Long confined to formalist and self-referential imperatives that invited us to see only what a work gives us to see—according to Clement Greenberg, ”the work of art cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself”— abstraction has gradually freed itself from the Greenbergian yolk to recapture its evocative power. On the historical path of this emancipation, it’s important to remember that abstraction did not appear with modernism: abstract motifs were already used to express invisible realities or the sacred in premodern visual cultures, most notably in medieval, ornamental Islamic, Celtic, and African art.

Yet the “recuperation” of abstraction by Western modernism likely played a role in shaping a rather radical and biased definition of abstract art, one that endured over time, as suggested by the following quote by art historian Georges Roque that cites an anthology published in 1995: “While modernism in the visual arts is a very varied movement, there is a case for claiming that it is most fully represented by abstraction. The ethos of abstraction sets visual and aesthetic experience above all else (such as narrative, illusion, or moral effect) and stresses the importance of the individual creative artist and the independence of the artist from society.”¹ 1 - Eric Fernie, Art History and its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London: Phaidon, 1995), 349.