With the late 19th and early 20th century developments in the approach to the surface of a painting, critics and philosophers began to turn to abstraction, first in Western Europe and then in the United States. The French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne was the most important figure in this new approach to the surface of painting. The two contemporary critics most convinced of Cézanne's evolutionary importance were the American Roger Fry (1866–1934), who coined the term Post-Impressionist, and Clive Bell (1881–1964), a member of the Bloomsbury Group in England. Fry and Bell considered Cézanne to be the most accomplished painter, who gave impetus to a new artistic era. Fry was instrumental in promoting the Post-Impressionist artists, enabling them to be exhibited and accepted in London; while Bell coined the phrase important form to express his notion of the defining quality of art. According to Bell, the subject of painting takes second place to the form, and the form, if it is important, is the very content of the art.
The idea of form as content became a prominent feature of art criticism and philosophy in the 20th century, consistent with the trend toward non-figurative abstraction. The American champion of abstraction (especially Abstract Expressionism), which developed in New York from the 1940s onwards, was the art critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), who rejected Plato's idea of art as mimesis (imitation). For Greenberg, modern abstract art had achieved a new purity: it was no longer concerned with the creation of recognizable, identifiable images, such as Magritte's pipe, but with the actual space of a painting. This included its surface (e.g., canvas, paper, or wall) and its material (e.g., paint, ink, or chalk). The narrative subject had given way to the form and processes of art. The painting surface was no longer considered the fourth wall of a stage or a window through which we see the world, but became the equivalent of the curtain that falls on the stage. As Greenberg wrote in 1961: “The space of the painting has lost its ‘inside’ and has become all ‘outside.’”
The most important American Abstract Expressionist artist is Jackson Pollock, known for his dynamic paintings using the technique of dripping paint – hence his nickname, “Dripping Jack”. Typically, Pollock would place a canvas on the ground and drip house paint onto it in a circular motion with a stick, creating vivid images of energetic and rhythmic movement. Pollock did not use traditional systems of perspective to create the illusion of depth; instead, he focused the viewer’s attention on the activity of the paint on the surface of the painting. The movements were evident in the artist’s creative process during the production of a work of art.
As styles evolved beyond Abstract Expressionism, radical changes occurred at a dizzying pace. Pop artists challenged Greenberg's views on what art was; in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they began to present identifiable objects and figures again, now taking as their subject matter everyday objects and mass-produced products. Conceptualists, in contrast, reacted to Pop art by valuing the concept or ideas about art, rather than the finished work. According to conceptualism, as expressed prominently in the writings of the American artist Sol LeWitt, the execution of a work of art could be carried out by anyone, following written instructions from the artist. Thus, a work of art could be made more than once, depending on the owner of those instructions. Consequently, LeWitt often (though not always) sold instructions for making a work of art, rather than working on it himself.
Minimalists, inspired by their focus on nature, the dynamic brushwork of Abstract Expressionism, and the depiction of everyday objects in Pop Art, created geometric shapes and used ready-made materials such as glass and steel instead of traditional art tools. Dan Flavin created sculptures using fluorescent light bulbs, while Donald Judd organized the placement of metal boxes on the floor or on the wall.
Photo by Nagihan Gülmez : https://www.pexels.com/photo/statue-in-front-of-a-marble-wall-13922017/
