Driven to Abstraction

The unwary gallerygoer whose eye lights on an abstract painting immediately suspects that someone is trying to pull his leg. He is baffled or indignant when such an expert as the New York Times's Edward Alden Jewell proclaims some of it "great art." Last week in Manhattan, three famed abstractionists were on display, to give the layman that old feeling.

Of the three, the canvases of Swiss-born Paul Klee (1879-1940) were the most recognizable. Concealed in his childlike scrawling was many a suggestion of reality (shadowy trees, clouds, heads); much of his work possessed simplicity, sharpness and humor, and a spontaneity as fresh as a candid camera shot.

Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), whose designs are both whirling and geometrical, hated the thought of painting "dogs, vases, naked women." To him "a circle is a living wonder" and a blob of color is enough to convey a mood (blue, "the typical heavenly color," stands for rest; blue-black for grief; violet, the echo of grief; green is "the bourgeoisie --self-satisfied, immovable, narrow").

Dutch-born Piet Mondricm (1872-1944), pioneer of purest abstractionism, also felt fettered by objects. But where Kandinsky went off in a whirl, Mondrian painted straight, narrow paths. He finally became so ascetic that curves were too emotional for him, and he drew nothing but horizontal and vertical lines, convinced that the right angle was the purest "expression of the two opposing forces [which] constitute life." To the uninitiated, the result might look something like a linoleum pattern, but Mondrian spent days shifting colored Scotch tape around a canvas, hoping to achieve a perfect harmony of balanced rectangles.

Klee, Kandinsky and Mondrian stand in somewhat the same relation to art as Gertrude Stein does to literature. Just as the unfettered Stein prose confused many a layman but benefited such popular writers as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, so the abstractionists have had a major impact on U.S. typography, advertising layout, architecture (see cut). By now, the layman, whether he knows it or not, owes a good-sized debt to the nonobjective painters.

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