Art of Our Own

As an artist, I found An Art of Our Own to be a truly great book by an inspiring, deeply informed writer! If you're serious about learning the fundamental purpose of genuine abstraction, pay no attention to the ridiculous and shallow review from the Library Journal. The quality or value of writing, scholarship and art is subjective, which should be an obvious fact. Consider this: regarding the great pioneers of early abstraction (Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich etc), the "private symbolism" referred to by the Lirbary Journal critic is far from being a merely personal thing, but rather springs from the collective unconscious and is in truth the foundation of all things Universal. As established by Frazer (The Golden Bough), Campbell (Hero With a Thousand Faces) and David Fideler (Jesus Christ, Sun of God), we have common instincts, desires, motivations and beliefs that can and are expressed through symbolism or metaphors. How these universal ideas and feelings came to be expressed succinctly through the evolution of painting and abstraction is masterfully documented by Lipsey and establishes the initial impetus for modern art. This is essential knowledge for artists interested in learning the traditions from which abstraction transformed representational images and gave birth to an art of our own, as opposed to forms dictated by church, state or the marketplace.

I picked up this wonderful book after seeing a recommendation in Arthur Danto's column, which noted that Lipsey is one of the few writers who can address the spiritual in modern art in a clear-cut way. I couldn't agree more. If more writers and critics had this facility perhaps the contempory artists whose work is most enriching (Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Astrid Colomar, etc.) would be properly viewed those who are most related to the origiginal pioneers of modern painting. As Lipsey demonstrates, the primary impetus for these pioneers was metaphysiscal rather than formalist. Were it not for Lipsey and precious few others, this crucial element of the history of modern painting would be all but lost in the vast majority of contemporary scholarship.

Lipsey describes the social and political scene that surrounded each of the major styles in art that have emerged in the twentieth century and describes the art forms and thinking of many of the well-known artists within each movement--Cezanne's relentless pursuit of the essence of nature, Kandinsky's definitions of the spiritual quality of color and form, the poetry of structure in Cubism, Dada and Duchamp in reaction to World War I, the Russian Avant- Garde and Malevich's Suprematism as integral to the Revolution of 1917, and the domination of abstract art after World War II. Lipsey's theme is that "Twentieth century art embodied a stronger and wiser spirituality than we have fully acknowledged," and his choice of artists is governed not by the degree of their fame, but by the degree to which they succeeded in embodying a contemporary spirituality. Modern art is a statement of philosophy that differs from previous eras, Lipsey posits, in part because "t! wentieth-century artists have for the most part worked individually and without formal adherence to religious or spiritual traditions." Lipsey's careful and thoughtful exploration of the spiritual in twentieth-century art has enormously enlarged this reader's ability to see abstract art and benefit from the experience.