Just imagine...
Are we as enraptured by an abstract monochrome as we are by a rich figurative scene? Take a detail from a figurative Last Supper by Philippe de Champaigne in the Louvre. The table linen is strikingly realistic, but also "actual", in the sense that the object and the act are made present. Texture, folds, the fall of the cloth... the tablecloth appears almost tangible, and the act of unfolding and laying it on the table is visible.
Contemplation of the tablecloth ushers us into a new space, where we are sensitive to "the inner resonance of form" (1). The object gives way to color and, above all, to line, which no longer imitates the visible but "makes visible", for line is "the purity of a genesis of things" (2). It is no longer the tablecloth that occupies the mind, but an expanse of luminous white crossed by a line of slightly darker white, like Barnett Newman's The Voice. The tablecloth has been abstracted.
Salomon Slijper, a great collector of Mondrian's work, declared that it had taken him some time to get used to the first abstract painting he had ever seen. A few weeks later, he admitted that the painting had had an effect on him. However, he says, it took him years "to understand that the appeal of this painting lay in Mondrian's unyielding determination to reach the very foundation of existence." (3)
Clara Pagnussatt
1. Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 1912
2. Paul Klee, quoted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in L'œil et l'esprit, 1960
3. Cf. Press Kit for the Mondrian Figuratif exhibition, Musée Marmottan Monet, 2019
Works :
Philippe de Champaigne, The Last Supper, ca. 1652 - Musée du Louvre - © : CP
Barnett Newman, The Voice, 1950 - MoMA (photo credit)
