Abstract art - 3 the hard way

Notes to 3 the hard way

Using oil pastels, a medium that allows for fluid, unrestricted action, 3 figures emerged from the darkness and forcefully presented themselves on the page.

In 1911, Guillaume Apollinaire, the spokesman on Cubism wrote that they had accepted a profound connection between the Cubist multiple perspectives and the dynamic nonperspective conception of space-time and had made the concept of the fourth dimension a commonplace of modern aesthetics and the vocabulary of modern art.

"Dynamic nonperspective" seem to be a contradiction in terms, but the dynamism in a fluid, almost aggressive attack on the paper seem to propel the figures forward. Menacingly.

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Paul Klee's Pictorial Universe

One of the artist that I've read about avidly, is Paul Klee. Born in 1879, his was a brilliant career that incorporated Cubism, and the German alternative to Cubism - German Expressionism. Working with his friend Wassily Kandinsky, considered the father of Abstract art, as tutors at the Bauhaus. Much is written about both artists.

Today I wanted to draw reference to the wide ranging subject matter and sources, Klee incorporated in his inventions.

Phillip Larson wrote " His internal source books laid out Cubist frameworks, stratified color charts, calligraphic flourishes, children's drawings, proto-Surrealist doodles, toys and puppets, caricatures, tribal masks, minute zoological/biological specimens, architectural/theatrical perspectives, pictographs/hieroglyphs, and, of course, all keys to the German typewriter. To this day, no historian has secured the critical perimeters around the prodigious collector-progenitor."

His love for music, musical instruments and the theatre were also depicted in numerous drawings and paintings.

Picasso's remarks on art

While browsing through my dusty collection of art books, I came across "Picasso on Art- A selection of views" by Dore Ashton.

Christian Zervos, in 1935, put down these remarks of Picasso immediately after a conversation with him. Here's an interesting excerpt,

"A picture is not thought out or settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one's thought change. And when it is finished, it still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives a life like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man who is looking at it."

Abstract Painting influenced by Science?

I just read an interesting theory about the radical shift in thinking and the conception of reality that took place at the turn of the 20th century in Modern Art.

To quote from 'Painting in the Twentieth Century' by Werner Haftmann, - " Dates seem to suggest that some kind of connection exists between science and painting. The radical changes in painting took place between 1900 and 1910. Significant dates are: 1905 Fauvism; 1907 Cubism; 1910 the first abstract painting. A concordance of of dates important in the history of science runs thus: 1900 Planck's quantum theory; and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; 1905 Einstein's special theory of relativity; 1908 Minkowski's mathematical formulation of the dimensions of space-time."

Many artists such as Klee, Kandinsky, Delaunay and others have stated that their encounters with the discoveries of natural science often threw light upon their own intuitive and artistic activity.

What do you think? That there was a close connection between the new discoveries in science and the radical shifts in the way art was viewed by the prominent and well read artists of these early periods of the 20th century? I think so.