ART CHRONICLE
of the pictorial work of art-an object in its turn too-which governs
genuine Cubist style. By drawing an analogy with the way in which an
object's form and identity possess every grain of the substance of which
it is composed, the Cubists were able to give their main problem, that
of the unity of the flat picture plane, a strict and durable solution.
As the poem, play, or novel depends for its final principle of form
on the prevailing conception of the essential structure that integrates
an event or cluster of events in actuality, so the form of a picture de–
pends always on a similar conception of the structure that integrates
visual experience "in nature." The spontaneous integrity and complete–
ness of the event or thing seen guides the artist in forming the invented
event or object that is the work of art. This seems to me to
be
always
true, but it is particularly important to point it out in the case of Cubism
since Cubism has evolved into abstract art, and abstract art seems-but
only seems-to conceal its relation to nature.
Picasso, Braque, Gris, Leger, Klee are never able to dispense with
the object in nature as a starting point, no matter how far they may go
at times toward the abstract. Without the support of nature, Picasso
and Braque would not have had the means of organizing their beautiful
collages, utterly remote from their models as they seem, into the intense
unities which they are. The integrity, the self-subsistent, harmonious
fact of mandolin, bottle, or wineglass called up an echo that was largely
unrecognizable no doubt, but which became as valid, because of its
form, within the order of art as the original perception of the mandolin
or bottle was within the order of practical experience.
Other, later masters have been able to do without the object as a start–
ing point. But I feel that outright abstract painting, including Mon–
drian's, when it is successful establishes its aesthetic right in the same
way, ultimately, as did the masterpieces of Cubism-by referring to the
integrity of objects in nature. Mondrian's pictures certainly do. It is
not because they are abstract that the works of the later Kandinsky and
his
followers fail to achieve coherence and substantiality, remaining for
the most part mere pieces of arbitrary decoration; it is because they lack
a sense of style, a feeling for the unity of the picture as an object; that
is,
they lack almost all reference to the structure of nature. The best
modern painting, though it is mostly abstract painting, remains naturalistic
in its core, despite all appearances to the contrary. It refers to the
structure of the given world both outside and inside human beings.
The artist who, like the Nabis, the later Kandinsky, and so many of the
disciples of the Bauhaus, tries to refer to anything else walks in a void.
Clement Greenberg
81
