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Started reading
August 13, 2021
Until the twentieth century, Western art had traditionally portrayed the world in a three-dimensional perspective, using recognizable images in a familiar way. Abstract art broke with that tradition to show us the world in a completely unfamiliar way, exploring the relationship of shapes, spaces, and colors to one another.
They explored the nature of visual representation by reducing images to their essential elements of form, line, color, or light.
My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims—scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to elicit a new perceptual and emotional response in the beholder—they are analogous.
They focused almost exclusively on form and gesture, finding in the space, color, and structure of a painting the basis for a complex and satisfying critical perspective (Lipsey 1988, 298).
Rothko’s paintings consist of strong formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale.
As Rothko was to say about these later works, “A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an experience.”
Following the lead of Paul Cézanne and the Cubists, Greenberg saw that the distinctive feature of painting is its flatness; therefore, he thought that painting should purge itself of all illusions of depth and turn that concern over to sculpture.
Wilson argues that knowledge is gained and science progresses through a process of conflict and resolution.
