![Sample our Museum and Heritage Studies journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5945/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Museum-Heritage-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
Focusing on the work of the Robert Ryman and with additional thoughts about Robert Motherwell, this text addresses co-called Analytic Abstraction in painting, for which it finds precedents in the Picasso’s collages and the Constructivism of László Moholy-Nagy.
Notes
1 Translator’s note: Robert Ryman was born in 1930.
2 Translator’s note: Barnett Newman (1905-1970) major figure in Abstract Expressionism.
3 Translator’s note: Bonnefoi is referring to the Greek: Techne meaning the way or means by which an end is attained, something like craftsmanship. Logos is the thought behind the expression, the rationale for an utterance.
4 The history of this “progress” could be the history of the avant-garde theory of painting (of contemporary painting but also of classical painting in that some of its features—Uccello, Pontormo— involve what we are talking about just as much).
5 Translator’s note: Christian Bonnefoi largely contributed to the fundamental distinction between the tableau — a ‘modality of the plane, time and the invisible’ — and painting: ‘an art of surface, space and the visible’.
6 Another touchstone, another Rymanian radicality: the perpendicular series, foreseeable from Newman onwards, through opposition to the lateral series, formal, pedagogic about minimal and post-etc. Each work is differential investigation, original (all the time reinvention of the body, of a posture: first, avoid putting in stereotypes in terms of behaviour, the material, that will follow in the form). Suddenly, all work being exhibited in a lateral series was unmasked in its stylistic mechanism, laborious, if it hadn’t already achieved the course of its density, if it hadn’t established the knowledge of that which, once postulated, catches, clings, sinks in, sticks, grips; and how? In which time? Because there is an active time when the painting also makes itself in the absence of the painter: whilst drying. Stick, pin, cross, dry: homage to Picasso.
7 Translator’s note: by Gestualité Bonnefoi is presumably referring to “action painting”.
8 Translator’s note: The term “all-over” refers to “decentralized” compositions that extend to (and over) the edges of the support, such as Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.
9 Translator’s note: Morris Louis Bernstein (1912-1962) American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Colour Field painting.
10 Translator’s note: Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist, member of the New York School, which included Pollock.
11 Translator’s note: Daniel Buren (b. 1938) French artist known for Conceptual art, particularly “degree zero painting” which he developed.
12 Translator’s note: Piet Mondrain (1872–1944), Dutch painter and theoretician, part of the De Stijl group and the inventor of Neoplasticism. He famously said that, “to approach the spiritual in Art one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual”.
13 Translator’s note: László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) Hungarian painter and photographer, professor in the Bauhaus school
14 Ryman posits the idea of abandon, of a sloppiness in terms of the action and pigment on a road to discovery which adopts these in place of subject and visual control. This could be chemical knowledge (of pigments) but is already invested with memory.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Christian Bonnefoi
Translated from French by Susan de Muth Originally published as “A propos de la destruction de l’entité de surface”, in Macula, 1978: 163–166