Gallery 17 - Abstract Art

Abstract Art

Abstract art can be bizarre and baffling, it can also be funny, frivolous and fascinating. Sometimes it can be challenging, stimulating and exciting.

Abstract art is a kind of visual thinking with colour, shape and form. It is based on the inner experience of the artist rather than the appearance of outer reality.

Following the invention of photography some artists questioned the need for copying the world around them when photographs could do the job so well. They moved away from representational art and towards exploring spiritual and emotional ideas and looking at patterns and shapes.

‘The object of art is to give life a shape’. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The nature of abstract art is evocative rather than descriptive. It can stimulate our senses and inner feelings without storytelling.

St Ives Group

St Ives is a small fishing town on the north coast of Cornwall. With its rugged landscape, romantic isolation and fine quality of light, it became a haven for artists.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, St Ives gained a reputation as a centre for a European form of abstraction whose roots lay in nature. Ben Nicholson and his wife, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, were key figures in the St Ives Group. At the end of the war, a number of younger artists followed them and settled in the surrounding area.

Although there has never been a coherent ‘St Ives Style’, works by a diverse group of artists possess a likeness in their approach to colour, texture, light and atmosphere. The town and surrounding dramatic Cornish coastline were the artists’ starting point for still life, landscapes and collages that became abstracted.

Weathering the Elements

Throughout history, artists and writers have been inspired by ever-changing displays of weather: irregular, harsh, volatile, unyielding and active forces in constant flux.

Weather has no boundaries or fixed forms. This is a perfect analogy for modern artists who found refuge beyond their native countries. The three artists in this display sought what the poet Charles Tomlinson calls ‘a language of water, light and air’ in open unanchored spaces. They saw the possibilities for an abstraction derived from natural phenomena that prioritised colour, form and surface.

The abstract appearance of the intangible mists and clouds on the west coast of Scotland translates into the large expanse of sombre and subdued greys in Jon Schueler’s Night Sky, July II.

In contrast, Henry Inlander’s rich palette captures the climate of his Italian retreat in the small rural hill town of Anticoli Corrado, near Rome.

Standing at the Mediterranean coastline during his visit to Nice, Peter Kinley was enchanted by the raw and radiant light and colour. His composition evokes the sun-drenched coastal landscape of southern France.

Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism refers to an American art movement that emerged in the late 1940s. Abstract Expressionists rejected conventional ways of making art. They valued spontaneity and improvisation in their creative processes.

The methods of producing the painting were as important as the final artwork itself. Artists preferred to work on a huge scale, often with large brushes or sticks, sometimes pouring, dripping or even throwing paint onto their canvases.

Some of their paintings consist of expanses of flattened colour with precise straight or hard edges. The absence of any recognisable subject fixes our attention to the process of painting and the act of creation.

‘The canvas is an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyse or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.’ Harold Rosenberg, Tradition of the New, 1959.

This display focuses on British artists who were inspired by Abstract Expressionism, and like the artists before them, they were preoccupied with the paint and the processes of painting to express their deepest thoughts and feelings.

Scottish Ballad

Robert Motherwell, born in the USA to Scottish and Irish parents, was a leading American Abstract Expressionist painter. He retained links with Scotland throughout his career.

Motherwell believed that abstract art depended, like music, on pure form to arouse people’s feelings.

‘To create is not to repeat, but to discover, critically, radically and freshly.’ Robert Motherwell

He explained: ‘What I hope is that someday in the future there will be more people who can see [abstract art] the way most people can hear music […] that it won’t be necessary to explain. People could just listen or see, and immediately dig it, the way they do Mozart or the Beatles.