COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, SEPTEMBER 2016The abstract artists of the New York School succeeded in reducing the complex visual world around us to its essence of form, line, color, and light. This approach contrasts sharply with the history of Western art from Giotto and the Florentine Renaissance to Monet and the French Impressionists. Post-Renaissance artists attempted to create an illusion of the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas, but with the advent of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century, artists felt the need to create a new form—an abstract, nonfigurative art—that would incorporate some of the new ideas emerging from science. Artists also began to see analogies between their abstract work and music, which has no content, uses abstract elements of sound and division of time, and yet moves us enormously.
One reason may be that some abstract works, with their reduction of figuration, color, and light, are uncluttered. Yet even when an abstract work is cluttered, like an action painting by Jackson Pollock, it generally does not rely on an external framework of knowledge. Each work is highly ambiguous, as great poetry is, and each focuses our attention on the work itself, without reference to people or objects in the external environment. As a result, we project our own impressions, memories, aspirations, and feelings onto the canvas. It is like a perfect psychoanalytical transference, where the patient imposes upon the therapist a replay of experiences with parents and other important individuals, or like the repetition of a word or a tone in Buddhist meditation.
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