Inventing Abstraction, 53rd Street, New York

Tomorrow, Sunday, is the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show opening in New York. What is understood as real - and the relationship of what is real to what is natural - was given a twist that continues to unravel old knots.

Even a century later the frisson of this moment can be reclaimed at Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925 continuing through April 15 at the Museum of Modern Art.

The provocation begins by opening the exhibition with three Picasso's.  Surely most who show up here will remember his claim, "There is no abstract art. You always have to begin with something."

Femme a la mandoline (1910)

Pablo Picasso

Museum Ludwig, Cologne

The admittedly abstract-appearing works (including above) are juxtaposed with a Kandinsky quote in giant letters above the sixth floor doorway to the special exhibition space: "Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?"

The dialectic is engaged.  It continues throughout the exhibit and I expect - hope - each visitor leaves with a somewhat different response to Picasso and answer to Kandinsky's question.

Komposition V (1911)

Wassily Kandinsky

Private Collection

There are thirteen works by Kandinsky.  Komposition V, a six foot by nine foot canvas, engulfed me, transforming time and space as much as any mature Rothko. But among the well-knowns are many I would not have been able to name and works unknown to me by the best known.

Sonia Delaunay-Terk has left me infatuated.  I can recall seeing some of her Orphic pieces, but had no specific sense of her story, place, or influence.  What exquisite vision.  I could not really read her poet-partner's prose.  But the travel from Paris across Siberia to Harbin unfolded - literally and figuratively. The original of what is shown below is 78 inches long and 14 inches wide.

La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913)

Sonia Delaunay-Terk

In the New Republic, Jed Perl concludes his fine review as follows:

I am left thinking that a broader definition of abstraction—a definition that fully embraced the achievements of Miró and Klee and the later work of Kandinsky (which with its symbolic forms may strike Dickerman as insufficiently abstract)—would make it easier to see the art of the twentieth century as a whole. And I am left thinking that a more honest and inclusive view of early modernism would render irrelevant all the talk of postmodernism, because so many of the values we tend to associate with postmodernism—narrative, symbolism, heterogeneity—are in fact aspects of early modernism. As for Picasso’s comment that “you always have to begin with something,” this may reflect not so much a rejection of abstract art as a rejection by this supremely pragmatic and skeptical artist of the spiritual longings that were so often associated with abstract art. The fact is that every artist in “Inventing Abstraction” began with something, even if that something was only a rectangular shape. The invention of abstraction was not about replacing something with nothing or craft with idea (as Dickerman would have Duchamp telling us). Abstraction was the new reality. Apparently we are still catching up with that reality.