Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

REDUCTIONISM IN THE EMERGENCE OF ABSTRACT ART

Much as a brain scientist can use reductionism to focus on very simple cases of learning and memory and to delineate the process of visual perception, so an artist can use reductionism to focus on form, line, color, or light. In its most holistic form, reductionism allows an artist to move from figuration to abstraction, the absence of figuration. The following chapters consider several examples of artists who have focused on one or more of these components of art, beginning with J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Arnold Schoenberg, and Wassily Kandinsky.

TURNER AND THE MOVE TOWARD ABSTRACTION

One of the first artists to use reduction of detail to move from figuration to abstraction was Joseph Mallord William Turner, one of Britain’s greatest artists (fig. 5.1). Born in 1795, he worked for several architects as a young man, and many of his early sketches were exercises in architectural perspective. At the remarkably young age of fourteen he entered the Royal Academy of Art schools. One year later he was accepted into the Academy. He began to paint landscapes and seascapes, and is now considered the most important artist to have elevated landscapes to the same level of importance as historical paintings.

5.1 Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)

Turner was a master of seascapes, capable of rendering the effects of nature in infinite detail, yet on an epic scale. Early in his career, in 1803, he painted Calais Pier. An admirably realistic painting, it depicts several ships on a rough sea, with dramatic use of light, shadow, and perspective and with careful attention to detail: sails strained by the wind, a white seagull against a dark storm cloud. Waves, clouds, the horizon, boats, sails, and people are all clearly represented (fig. 5.2).

Forty years later, in 1842, Turner, then in his late sixties, took on a similar theme in the painting Snowstorm (fig. 5.3). Seven years earlier he had toured the continent, visiting Germany, Denmark, Holland, and Bohemia. A few years after that he had gone to Italy and visited Venice. In each country he studied how light and mist rising from bodies of water affect a visual scene.

In Snowstorm, figurative elements are so reduced as to be practically nonexistent. Gone are the clearly delineated clouds, sky, and waves; the ship is merely suggested by the line of its mast. The distinction between sea and sky is barely perceptible, yet the viewer senses the towering masses of water, the sweep of wind and rain pounding the ship with terrible ferocity, the powerful, spiraling arrangement of dark and light. By conveying the overwhelming power of movement in nature without the use of clearly defined forms, Turner evokes an even stronger emotional response in Snowstorm than he did in Calais Pier. The English literary critic, philosopher, and painter William Hazlitt (1778–1830), who greatly admired Turner, referred to his later work as “atmospheric” and “all without form.”

At the time Turner was painting the remarkable Snowstorm, photography was beginning to revolutionize our ability to capture a view of the world and convert it to a two-dimensional surface. During the Renaissance, Western painting evolved to a progressively more realistic depiction of the world. From Giotto to Gustave Courbet, the skill of the artist was generally measured by the ability to create an illusion of reality: that is, by the ability to convey the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas.

In 1877 a photograph of a galloping horse—which showed all four of its hooves off the ground for a split second—presented the viewer with a depiction of reality that painting was hard put to match. As a result, a dialogue emerged between the two art forms, and painting lost what Ernst Gombrich called its “unique ethological niche” in the world of depiction. This prompted a search for alternative niches, one of which was greater abstraction.

Meanwhile, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first published in 1905, was beginning to be discussed in the public media. The theory challenged absolute notions of space and time, and it eventually had a strong impact on public thinking. For one thing, it encouraged artists to question the classical view of figurative art. Since reality may no longer be as clear-cut as it seems, why does painting need to be a literal depiction of the world? Do we need to depict nature realistically in order to express ourselves? Creators of music, an extraordinary art form that moves us powerfully, do not feel compelled to replicate sounds heard in nature. This self-questioning ultimately led to experiments designed to enlarge the viewer’s experience in ways that nineteenth-century photography (and painting) could not.

5.2 J.M.W. Turner, Calais Pier: An English Packet Arriving, 1803

Turner was one of the first artists to free painting from the “dreary chore of mimesis,” and he did so substantially before the theory of relativity was published. Turner achieved this autonomy by handling paint in a new way: using more transparent oils and using color to create a shimmering effect to evoke an almost pure light. Both techniques enhanced his move toward abstraction. Importantly, Turner’s work shows that removing figurative elements from a painting does not remove the painting’s ability to recruit associations in the mind of the beholder. In fact, as we shall see, abstract art’s ability to recruit associations contributes to its power.

5.3 J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm: Steamboat Off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842

MONET AND IMPRESSIONISM

Somewhat later in the progression from figuration to abstraction, the French painter Claude Monet (fig. 5.4) effected a similar reduction in complexity. Early in his career Monet painted a series of figurative images featuring luncheons in the park, such as Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) of 1865 (fig. 5.5). These paintings both challenged and complemented Édouard Manet’s earlier painting of the same name. In the Manet painting, a nude woman was having a casual lunch in the park with two fully clothed men. Manet meant the painting to be liberating and defiant, but many viewers found it simply shocking.

5.4 Claude Monet (1840–1926)

Monet’s paintings were more conventional than Manet’s, but they were nevertheless remarkable in the way that they captured the movements of the participants. In Le Déjeuner of 1865, Monet depicts a standing woman adjusting her hair beside a man extending his left arm and a seated woman setting out the plates for lunch. The visual continuity between the man’s left arm and the left arm of the seated woman causes our eyes to move in circles around this large and wonderful painting of a size usually reserved for history paintings.

5.5 Claude Monet, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (right section), 1865–1866

Between 1870 and 1880, soon after completing these paintings, Monet was joined by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. Together they founded a movement of modern painters that also included Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Armand Guillaumin. This group emphasized painting outdoors and capturing the changing qualities of light during the course of a day, using pure color, blurring contours, and flattening the image—three early steps toward the emergence of abstraction. The term Impressionism, derived from Monet’s painting Impression, Soleil Levant (Sunrise) (fig. 5.6), was used to describe the movement. The term conveys the effect of a natural scene on the painter and the effect of the painting on the beholder.

5.6 Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil Levant, 1872

Impression, Soleil Levant is a hazy scene of sunrise on the port of Le Havre depicted with loose brushstrokes that are designed to give the beholder a sense of the scene rather than a faithfully realistic depiction. Louis Leroy, a critic for a Parisian newspaper, commented sarcastically on the unfinished quality of the work: “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape” (Rewald 1973). Influenced in part by Turner, Monet and the other Impressionists constructed their paintings from freely brushed color rather than from lines and contours. As a result, Impressionist art in general greatly influenced the emergence of abstract art.

Monet went on to create several other “series” paintings, depicting haystacks and cathedrals at various times of the day, to illustrate how a figurative image changes with different conditions of light. He used a limited palette of new, synthetic oil paints straight out of a tube and mixed the colors on the canvas.

In 1896 Monet began to develop cataracts, which compromised his vision. It was in this context that he painted his last series, 250 oil paintings of water lilies, for which he is best known. These works were painted between 1890 and 1920 at his home in Giverny, where he had constructed a Japanese wooden bridge and a water lily garden. Over time, the paintings began to take on progressively more abstract elements (fig. 5.7), thus encouraging contemplative viewing and study. Although we do not know whether Monet’s visual impairment affected his painting, it may very well have led to his reduction of detail. In 1923 he wrote to his friend Berheim-Jeune: “My poor eyesight makes me see everything in a complete fog. It’s very beautiful all the same.”

On November 12, 1918, the day after the armistice ending World War I was signed, Monet committed to giving the French government a set of large paintings as “a monument to peace.” Shortly after his death, in 1926 at the age of eighty-six, the French government constructed two oval galleries at the Musée de l’Orangerie, near the Louvre in Paris, as a permanent home for eight water lily murals.

The galleries, which have seats for viewing and contemplation, are almost invariably filled with people who are entranced by the broad brushstrokes, bright colors, and rich texture of these works. Most of the murals do not show the sky, only the infinity of the lily pond. These remarkable works are filled with ambiguity and beauty. We see in them the beginnings of a change from a dialogue between the artist and his subject to a dialogue between the artist and the canvas. We shall return to this dialogue when we meet Jackson Pollock.

5.7 Claude Monet, The Water Lily Pond (Nymphéas), 1904

In Monet’s paintings, as in Turner’s, we see that the movement toward abstraction has a magic of its own, and that it can be more inspiring than figurative art.

SCHOENBERG, KANDINSKY, AND THE FIRST TRULY ABSTRACT IMAGES

As artists started to move toward abstraction, they began to see analogies between their art and music. Although music has no content and uses abstract elements of sound and division of time, it moves us powerfully. Why, then, does pictorial art have to have content? This question was addressed by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who pioneered a new style of prose-poetry and wrote the famous volume of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), in which he described the changing nature of beauty in modern life. Baudelaire argued that even though each of our senses responds to a restricted range of stimuli, all of the senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level. It is therefore particularly interesting that the earliest truly abstract painting was achieved by the pioneer of abstract music, Arnold Schoenberg.

An often-repeated episode in the history of modern art has it that Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), the Russian painter and art theorist, tried to abandon figurative painting but could not succeed completely until January 1, 1911. On that date he attended a New Year’s concert in Munich and heard for the first time Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, composed in 1906, and Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, composed in 1909. Best known as the composer who founded the Second Vienna School of Music, Schoenberg (1874–1951) introduced a new conception of harmony that had no central key, only changes in timbre and tone.

This revolutionary form of composition, referred to as atonality, electrified Kandinsky. It showed him that one could reject an artistic convention—the idea of a central key in classical music—and create a more abstract approach. Kandinsky then proceeded to break free of the painterly convention of representing nature and abandoned the last vestiges of figuration. In Murnau with Church 1 (fig. 5.8) he uses bright colors, but the outlines of the church have become obscure. In 1911 he created Sketch for Composition V (fig. 5.9), a work that makes no reference to nature—until then, the central focus of art—or to any recognizable object. It is commonly considered the first abstract painting, a historic work in the canon of Western art.

5.8 Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau with Church 1, 1910

5.9 Wassily Kandinsky, Sketch for Composition V, 1911

Kandinsky’s embrace of abstraction by no means lessens the magic of his paintings or the involvement of the viewer. In fact, the abstract elements of Sketch for Composition V present a greater challenge to the viewer’s eye and mind, and place greater demands on the viewer’s imagination, than do the figurative elements of Murnau with Church 1.

Two major styles of visual art influenced Kandinsky: Impressionism and Cubism. The Impressionists realized that they need not represent exactly what they saw; instead, they conveyed what they felt, their state of mind. This realization was carried a step further by the Cubists, beginning with Fernand Léger’s Nudes in the Forest (1909) and Georges Braque’s Still Life with Metronome (1909) (Braun and Rabinow 2014). Léger and Braque, like Cézanne, eliminated perspective from their paintings and often depicted the same image from different vantage points. As the conceptual pioneer of abstraction, Kandinsky was the first artist to express abstract forms in colors, signs, and symbols. He realized intuitively that the beholder associates signs, symbols, and colors with images, ideas, events, and emotions recalled from memory.

Inspired by Cézanne’s work and that of the Cubists, Kandinsky wrote an extraordinarily prescient treatise in 1910 entitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art. He followed this in 1926 with a second book, Point and Line to Plane. In these books he points out that painters can make elements of art more objective by emphasizing line, color, and light, thus helping to systematize abstraction. Moreover, his writings provided a philosophical underpinning for abstraction. Kandinsky argued that, like music, art need not represent objects: the sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul can only be expressed through abstraction. Just as music moves the heart of the listener, so form and color in painting should move the heart of the beholder.

A less well-known fact in the annals of abstraction is that Schoenberg, the great innovator in music, had actually accomplished an innovation in abstract painting a year earlier than Kandinsky (Kallir 1984; Kandel 2012). While other pioneers, such as Kandinsky, approached abstraction through landscapes, Schoenberg, a talented and original painter, reached abstraction through portraiture, a means not seen again until the mid-twentieth century, in the work of Willem de Kooning.

Schoenberg began painting in 1909 with an Expressionist self-portrait (fig. 5.10) and rapidly moved on to more abstract versions, which he called “visions” (figs. 5.11–5.13). His 1910 paintings Red Gaze (fig. 5.12) and Thinking (fig. 5.13) challenge the viewer to interpret his intention, an interpretation that must depend heavily on the viewer’s own imagination. This reductionist approach became even more abstract and systematic in the work of Piet Mondrian, de Kooning, Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Morris Louis, whose paintings are more, rather than less, interesting in their engagement with the beholder.

5.10 Arnold Schoenberg, Self-portrait 1910

5.11 Arnold Schoenberg, Gaze, ca. 1910

5.12 Arnold Schoenberg, Red Gaze, 1910

5.13 Arnold Schoenberg, Thinking, ca. 1910