How can we explain the fact that some paintings, sculptures, or buildings for that matter, are so fundamentally different from other works of a similar nature? Just separating them into “abstract” and “realistic” categories doesn’t seem to clarify the rich profusion of work out there.

Perhaps one means of better understanding the outpouring of artistic creativity in Western culture would be to look at some different kinds of motivation that typically prompt artists to produce art. Painters, sculptors, architects, “folk”artists, and graphic designers, for example,sometimes appear to move in broadly similar directions. Unfortunately artists don’t regularly communicate verbally about what they are doing, but by looking at outcomes, we can sometimes discern what interests them.

In the Introduction, we made the point that early Greeks saw a fundamental distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses — that is, between the search for order (Apollonian) on one hand, and expression, freedom and excitement (Dionysian) on the other. Translated into artistic motivation, I think we can distinguish works which: a) are mainly concerned with “right arrangement” (order) of elements such as line,shape and color, from those, b) which are primarily directed toward “visual excitement.”

For the sake of clarity in this discussion, we shall call the “Apollonian” impulse (to achieve integrative values such as structure, order and control) by the term plastic. The desire for aesthetic excitement and freedom of expression (Dionysian), in contrast, we will call the decorative impulse. Taken separately or together, these two kinds of motivation would probably account for much of the art work described in pages to come. Though they are sometimes found separately, more often,”plastic order” and “decorativeness” occur in a delicate balance.

But that is obviously not the whole story of art through the centuries. The plastic and decorative impulses have certainly been major sources of artistic motivation since the end of the 19th century, but before that time, there was usually a strong descriptive impulse that moved both artist and viewer. From “life cycles” of ancient Egyptian pharoahs and Apocalyptic scenes carved on Medieval churches, to 19th-cen American paintings by Winslow Homer(Fig.4-2), artists of the past have rarely been far removed from a literary or storytelling motivation. But in the last decades of the who during the Civil War had been an “illustrator” for Harper’s Weekly,increasingly turned his attention to plastic design (formal relationships) and ultimately to visual excitement. The value of a preoccupation with “design” may have been suggested to the artist by Japanese prints, at that time circulating widely in U.S. and European art markets. It is really only in the 20th-century that significant numbers of Western artists have chosen to diminish the descriptive function of their art in favor of overtly decorative or plastic combinations of color and form.

The term “abstract,” which has been grossly over-used in our time to define works whose motivation was not literary, actually has its root in the Latin “to take from.” Homer distills “essential relationships” of shape, value and color to the exclusion of any “superfluous detail” in his 1909 brace of tumbling ducks (Fig.4-3). The artist certainly includes more information than his Japanese counterpart (Fig.4-4), but far less than he might have thirty years earlier. (Fig.4-2) The ducks seem almost heraldic in their static arrangement in space, much like figures in an “ancient icon” of Greek pottery decoration (Fig, 4-5, by Exekias, ca. 530 B.C.)

Fig.4-5. Black-figured pottery design (530-525BC) by Greek master ,Exekias, emphasizes spatial placement of forms in coherent plastic relationship.(Achilles and Ajax at the Board Game)[/caption]The Greek pottery design of course demonstrates a strong mythic aspect (literary) to balance the plastic structure of “positive and negative shapes.” Nor did the celebrated painter, Exekias, altogether neglect our need for visual stimulation, as one can detect the decorative detail of Achilles’ and Ajax’ clothing, along with a repetitive border motif in the frieze above their heads.

To help shed further light on these motivational distinctions, we might compare three paintings dealing with similar subject-matter (sailboats). The first, by 19th century French artist, Edouard Manet, is called The Alabama and the Kearsarge, (1861, Fig. 4-6). The second, by 20th century American painter, Lyonel Feininger, is entitled The Glorious Victory of the Sloop Maria (1926, Fig. 4-7).

Before Manet discarded his primary concern for subject-matter in favor of bold experiments with technique,the artist was topically interested in a naval clash of Confederate and Federal ships off the U.S. coast. This appeared a timely and challanging subject, since the French had been staunch allies of Colonial Americans not two generations earlier.

It seems clear from looking at the result, that Manet was not overly preoccupied with precise location of the celebrated ships on his canvas (that is to say, the “ideal arrangement” of the two major shapes in his composition). Nor does he really exploit a naval battle for maximum visual excitement, as did for example the English Romantic, J. M. W. Turner, earlier in the century (Fig. 4-8, above). Elements such as sails, sea-spray, banners or cannon-fire which might attract attention visually are downplayed by Manet, and woven in to the fabric of information supplied the viewer. It would appear that Manet’s motivation was primarily literary or descriptive. In an epoch before news photography, his work would have the currency of today’s video reports, and not many television viewers would carp over formal structure of images on their evening news.

The Dufy painting (Boat Races at Deaville, Fig.4-9) obviously marches to a different drum-beat. Possibly recording a “regatta” at some yacht club, this work “plays” with shapes and colors suggestive of sailboats. Actually,we are not informed as to how large,or what type of sailboat they are, for it does not matter. All descriptive detail is subordinated to the visual effect of rhythmic “pointed forms,” splotches of color,and swaying lines of various thickness. Dufy would appear to be heavily motivated by a decorative impulse.

But, you might ask, is there al so a plastic sensibility at work here — that over-riding concern for the way an image is “put together?” (Dufy’s palette clearly is limited [ordered] by a complementary relationship.)

Possibly the best test of plastic content is to isolate a certain component of the painting (a given sailboat, in this case), and see what would be the result of moving that element to another position in the design. If it makes little or no difference, the conception is somewhat akin to wallpaper — a “decorative performance” which could be extended indefinitely. That is not a value judgment, but simply anacknowledgment that some art does not need to make us aware of its internal order, nor does it need to inform us. It is simply exciting to look at!

Another painting dealing with sail boats seems to underscore the fundamentally different artistic viewpoints at work here. By 20th-century artist Lyonel Feinenger, The Glorious Victory of the Sloop Maria, 1926 (Fig.4-7 illustrates an obvious preoccupation with the structure of geometric shapes with the logic of a tightly controlled colorscheme, and with relationships among vessels that hardly seem “accidents of history.” In this case, the artist created a strong recurrent pattern of pyramidal shapes combined with prismatic lighting effects that convey an overriding quest for order. Although this painting clearly contains substantial decorative material (line, color, shape, etc.) and a story-telling motif (“racing”), it is to the plastic consciousness that Feinenger is addressing his primary appeal. Colors are analagous blue / purple, with complementary orange in the foreground figures, hardly “accidents of nature.”

In another similar comparison, we might contrast 20th-century paintings involving the human figure: one by a French artist, Amedeo Modigliani (Fig.4-10), and another by an American named William Glackens. (Fig.4-12) The Modigliani figure is stated in general terms, with major emphasis on geometric shape of the body as it contrasts with a dark “ground” on which it rests. There is no extraneous detail (clothing, wallpaper, furnishings) of a literary nature — just a simple biomorphic form of the sort that fascinated the organization of the canvas, balance of the extremities of the woman’s body, and control of the visual components (e.g. a strong “pattern” in the dark background). As such, the Modigliani painting qualifies as a highly plastic performance.

Glackens, on the other hand, tells us much more about his model: her age, apparent coquettishness, height, weight, etc., and he even goes in to some detail about what clothes she was wearing when she arrived at the studio. In addition, he paints her hat with bold colors, and a bowl of fruit (from which she lifts an apple) with almost more intensity than he devotes to the nude figure. We have to conclude that Glackens was as interested in those decorative aspects as he was in the descriptive or story-telling possibilities (“Eve in the Garden?”), but by comparison with Modigliani, his plastic motivation would seem relatively casual. How difficult would it be to relocate the bowl of fruit elsewhere on the canvas?

Contrast with Modigliani’s plasticity and Glackens’ prominent descriptive motivation the playful decorativeness of an Odalisque (1925) by Raoul Dufy. (Fig.4-11) Linear “arabesques” of varying colors applied to the surface dissolve the figure into a visually stimulating pattern of moving textures, but we “know” little about the model or the setting, and there is little “structure” aside from the primary color scheme and horizontal alterations of tone in the ground. As in the sail boat piece, Dufy appears to delight in visual embellishment of the canvas for decorative purposes, rather than in geometry or journalism.

To underscore the secondary role of plastic considerations in the Glackens and Dufy paintings, we might look at Stillife (Fig. 4-13) by Cezanne. It was Cezanne’s practice to relate forms in his compositions by establishing continuities between the various objects, creating “figure-ground” relationships through color or tonality that “lock” elements together visually. It seems unlikely that anyone would be tempted to “rearrange” the carefully-orchestrated objects in a Cezanne still-life. Warm and cool color and passages of light and dark are woven through the pattern like choreographed dancers, and the resulting plastic arrangement is the antithesis of all that is “accidental. “There is also a strong decorative impulse here, and the artist surely describes a table full of fruit, but everything points to a highly-focused organizational impulse as dominant in this work.

Sometimes color functions as the principal plastic element in a painting, as with Derain’s Pool of London, 1928 (Fig.4-14) where three colors, magenta, blue and red are used to create an intricate pattern of verticals and diagonals. An artist’s reliance on this type of “limited color scheme” (such as primary, complementary, analagous) suggests formal interest (as opposed to random colors of Nature).

In contrast, Spanish artist, Joan Miro, combines decorative and literary impulses in a playful work known as Snobistic Party of the Princess, (1944). With self-consciously child-like conceptualism that isolates each geometric form with “local” color and arrays them on an undiferentiated field of azure, Miro eschews a broader “integrative” role for color such as Derain employed. The result is somewhat akin to a child’s game, “pin the tail on the donkey, “where in each piece of felt pinned to the play board has no “visual anchor” within the whole.

But historically, color is only one critical element utilized in the artist’s quest for plastic structure. Light-and-dark pattern, or chiaroscuro, has played a major role in the organization of visual experience since the Italian Renaissance, and as one can see in Figs. 4-16 and 4-17, painters as culturally diverse as the 17th-cen. Dutch artist, DeHooch, and the Modern American, Edward Hopper have used a strong pattern of value (tonal variation to create order in their imagery. Both artists have a strong story-telling motif in these pieces, but coherent (plastic) effects of dramatic lighting appear to take precedence over its theatrical usage (literary). Note how the dark pattern seek-out vertical and horizontal planes in both compositions, and light selectively etches surfaces which create static,”Mondrian-like” squares and rectangles.

Turning now from painting to sculpture, perhaps we can see if there are beneficial applications of this motivational theory to another art form. A figure by Jacques Lipchitz (Bather III, Fig.4-18) “depicts” little that would reveal circumstances of his familiar bodily continuities, such as hands, arms, shoulders and legs. Using geometric fragments which coalesce around a vertical axis, Lipchitz integrates his plastic design into an angular pattern of light-and-dark planes. Facets of light lend the work a secondary decorative quality.