ABSTRACT art – it sounds almost quaint now, doesn't it? When there are people who question the validity of painting itself, it is hard to remember that abstraction was once the battleground in the struggle over modern art between what then really was
the avant garde and a hostile and suspicious public.
Abstraction became synonymous with modernity and so became the focus of hostility to it, and that hostility, in Britain at least, was pretty fierce. Abstraction proposed that art was as autonomous as music and could be quite independent of representation. Though it was unacknowledged, art had been a partner with science in the project that defined the modern West, the endeavour to understand the world through description and analysis – representation in fact.
Looking back now we can see that art moved on from that position just as Clerk Maxwell and Einstein demonstrated that the world we are part of is far more mysterious, more dynamic and less solid than had always been supposed. It follows, too, that it is far less easily described. We have to look for metaphors instead and that is exactly what artists did. It was not simply that art followed science, however. In fact it was the other way around. Artists had long recognised that the objectivity claimed by science was a fiction, even if a necessary one, and that subjectivity is inescapably the human condition. To reflect any credible reality, art had to accommodate that fact. Mere description wouldn't do. There was a profound logic to the evolution of modern art, therefore, and abstraction was a natural part of it.
The exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMa) Echo and Transcend, explores a little of all this with examples drawn from Glasgow's own collections, supplemented with a few important loans. Here, however, it seems we must still fight old battles. Representation is still an issue. The title, Echo and Transcend, is evidently intended to locate abstraction in relation to "reality". "Some of the art works echo reality while others transcend it," the introduction says, "but none of them copy it."
That leaves a big question about what in fact is meant by reality, but at least it does recognise the plurality of abstraction, that it comes in almost as many forms as there are artists. A bit like Protestantism, you might say, where it sometimes seems there are almost as many churches as there are believers – is there a link?
The earliest work on view in GoMa is The Glass by Juan Gris, a charming little cubist still life from 1918. It is more an abstraction than abstract, a free variation on the familiar forms of still-life, though they are reduced to little more than a simple notation. In spite of pioneering Scots such as JD Fergusson, for whom this kind of thing was familiar from very early on, abstraction was slow to take root in Britain.
Fergusson is not here, but William McCance, who was much influenced by him and by the English Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, is represented by his painting Conflict. The idea that conflict can be liberating was promoted by Lewis and by the Italian Futurists who inspired him. It has echoes of Fascism and both later leant that way, as did Hugh MacDiarmid, with whom McCance was closely associated. Dating from 1922, McCance's picture really is abstract, and a very early example of it, even it is if not entirely successful. His idea seems to be intellectual, to find a symbolic equivalent for the idea of conflict as a creative force, rather than getting there spontaneously, however.
A decade later a more decorous kind of abstraction derived directly from Cubism became fashionable in England. Its greatest exponent was Ben Nicholson, represented here by a lovely still life. Like the little picture by Juan Gris, Nicholson uses summary notation to suggest a link with the bottles and glasses in a traditional still life, but his picture is really just a study in the delicate interplay of colour, line and surface. The brief sojourn of Jankel Adler in Glasgow during the war brought avant garde ideas to Scotland from Europe. An abstract painting by him from the 40s, called simply Composition, shows a much more expressionist approach. Adler creates a little visual drama but does not link it to anything recognisable. William Gear does something similar in Summer Garden, a vivid picture from just after the war, in which he uses jagged lines, bright colours and sharp tonal contrasts to create an atmosphere that suggests the title, but does not illustrate it. Having studied at Edinburgh College of Art before the war, Gear went straight from the army to Paris where he became a member of the Cobra group, a loose association of northern artists determined to start afresh with a new primitivism that was raw, expressive and unburdened by representation. Gear's work was very controversial at the time.
Alan Davie followed. One of the most impressive pictures here is his Cornucopia from 1960. A big painting, it is clearly the product of bold and rapid improvisation and is built up from motifs and patterns that work like phrases of music.
Davie's contemporary, Eduardo Paolozzi, achieved the impossible and improvised abstract sculpture. His brilliantly painted and nonsensically titled Hamlet in the Japanese Manner, is made of quasi-industrial bits and pieces that can be put together and taken apart in all sorts of different ways. Here it is displayed in several disjointed parts.
William Turnbull is another major Scottish artist of that post-war generation. His Siren dominates the end of the big hall. It is a bronze in the form of a highly stylised female torso, echoing the mysterious archaic figures found on the Cyclades, the islands that were home to the legendary Sirens. Turnbull's figure conjures notions of Jungian archetypes and the primeval memories that inhabit our dreams.
Gavin Scobie's beautiful bronze, Gorky's Pillow, which stands at the entrance to the gallery, actually suggests dreams and dreaming, linked through the name of the American Abstract Expressionist Arshile Gorky to the whole tradition of imaginative abstraction that evolved out of Surrealism.
There are four paintings here by John McLean, a painter who, more than any of his contemporaries has managed to liberate painting from any of the baggage of association to allow colour, surface and gesture joyfully to celebrate their autonomy. Looking at these pictures it seems a fulfilment of destiny that McLean is now working on a commission to provide a stained glass window for Norwich's great medieval cathedral.
Here at GoMa, however, the show is dominated by four large paintings by Bridget Riley. All are dynamic in different ways. You look at them and they won't stand still. Waves roll. Colours dance. Objectivity is an illusion and representation a distraction, they tell us. What happens in a picture is in the eye of the beholder and nowhere else.
One painter who is not included here, or in the Glasgow collection, but who should be, is Alasdair Taylor, who died last year. He was a friend and contemporary of Alasdair Gray, and Glasgow School of Art is showing work by both Alasdairs together. Gray's work is more familiar and crosses over with his writing, especially the pictures of the streets of Glasgow. The pictures on show include one or two that are less familiar, though, including a portrait of Taylor and his wife, Annalise, with their little boy, for instance, and a fine, rather Surrealist landscape of the Rock, Arran.
Taylor himself is revealed as a first-class abstract painter, however. There is a group of small pictures from 1970, incorporating collage with free gestural painting, that have a vivid, sensual excitement about them. In his large paintings, there are echoes of de Kooning, but also a manifest and very personal delight in the physical facts of painting – and that in the end is what abstraction is really about.
&149 Echo and Transcend until 1 March; The Two Alasdairs until 10 January
