Beatrice Mandelman’s exquisite untiled gouache, made during the 1960s, offers her audience roughly abstract shapes; mustard yellow and grayish blue are the colors predominating. The different elements are random and fit into each other like a jigsaw puzzle. This piece was made a good half-century after the high point of cubism, but its abstraction is not so far away from the earlier period.

 

When the works of a show span more than a decade or two, as happens in this exhibition, the challenge facing the viewer has to do with establishing connections rather than emphasizing differences. The stylistic attributes of abstract painting are more than a few, so the task is to find out how the examples in the exhibition are joined thematically—and also visually. Ties between works construct metaphorical similarities that enrich both the work and those looking at the art.

 

Henri Hayden’s 1920 still life consists of an oval bowl meant to carry foods—cheese, fruits, and other delicacies. However, the items on the plate are hard to recognize—the different shapes and textures lead to the experience of variance but do not yield a definitive version of an object. The lack, then, of a recognizable object known by its visual definition, shapes, and dimensions, moves this subtle and complex painting into an attractive intricacy, even if we cannot read the shapes as meaningful beyond the actual report. So the context—the oval platter meant to carry food—is to a good degree undermined by the items it holds, which defy easy recognition, and certainly do not resemble food.

 

Something like abstraction, geometric abstraction especially, tends to undermine our visual associations and expectations of actual objects. But then it might be said that abstract shapes are themselves objects—but ones that resist figurative recognition. A lot of the attributes we call forth to describe a figurative element or composition, such as line, color, or shape, fit into the larger arrangement of the composition. The attributes of painting are closely similar. They are as useful in treating aspects of a purely non-objective tableau as they are in rendering a readable vision. This is not to say that abstraction is, more or less, a close alternative to figurative energies. But it does mean that, often, the gap between what we can define and what we experience as existing outside conventional meaning is not necessarily as large as we assume.`

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Giacomo Balla’s wonderful study for a lampshade, created with tempera on cardboard, around 1920, consists of a curving swathe of a ground (the cardboard itself), decorated with many angular or triangular shapes. These shapes have their pointed ends directed downward, toward the bottom of the extended lampshade’s form. The colors used, including tan, red, orange, and black sharply define the shapes they fill. There is no indication of realism beyond the unintelligible actuality of what is seen, but this is hardly problematic in that the forms are so attractively specific and in cohesion with each other. By now, most viewers are comfortable with the autonomy of the non-objective form, which may or may not present ties to the more obvious things we accept as everyday realism. 

 

We need to remember that geometric abstraction originated and had its moment of triumph for a short period—at least the period of its first efflorescence. Artists worked within the field many years later; they still do. But the impulse to make such art is thoroughly determined.

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This show, an excellent introduction to the linear abstract impulse, raises our awareness in the best ways possible—as a new language to be understood, as the bridge between the past and future, which we now own. The works prove just how sharp the turn in events was, in a time more than ready for change.