Art Beyond Representation

As the world moved from the 19th century into the tumultuous 20th, artists increasingly abandoned the conventions of representation, seeking new forms of expression capable of capturing a world defined by political upheaval and unprecedented violence that literal representation appeared insufficient to capture. Rather than relying on recognizable subjects to convey meaning, abstract artists foregrounded formal elements such as color, line, shape, texture, and composition, challenging the assumption that art must reproduce or directly reference the visible world. The unprecedented scale of wartime destruction and human suffering created a time in which literal representation appeared insufficient. This shift became particularly significant in the United States following World War II, when American Abstract Expressionism emerged as a dominant force in the international art world. New York replaced Paris as a major art hub, elevating artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning to international prominence. 

Yet this narrative often positions American abstraction as the culmination of modernist experimentation. It is not. The Art Institute of Chicago’s Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury is a direct challenge to this Western narrative, placing artists from historically underrepresented regions and backgrounds alongside the figures who have traditionally dominated the canon of midcentury abstraction. 

Abstract Expressionism, as popularized in postwar society, is certainly not devoid of a diverse set of nationalities. Mark Rothko, known for his color field paintings, was born to a Jewish family in Latvia. Willem de Kooning, who headed an abstract style known as action painting, moved from Rotterdam to the United States at age 24. Despite their disparate backgrounds, both artists became part of the New York School, a group of abstract expressionists. 

Although a number of the American abstract expressionists were, in fact, immigrants and war veterans, their proximity to each other for exchange of ideas, as well as their location in one of the most culturally prominent cities, certainly augmented their fame as abstract expressionists.

As both of these aforementioned artists are displayed in Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury, a plethora of lesser-known artists are placed alongside them. A prime example is Hélio Oiticica, a Brazilian painter and sculptor, often attributed to the beginning of the Neo-Concrete movement in Brazil. Metaesquema, No. 244 (1957), Oiticica’s gouache-on-cardboard painting, exemplifies the exhibition's goal to complicate the conventional narrative of midcentury abstraction. Metaesquema, No. 244, showing red and blue semicircles on cardboard, is part of Oiticica’s broader Metaesquema series, with over 350 geometric works created between 1957 and 1958. He worked with the Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro, a group of Brazilian artists in the 1950s. The Metaesquema series sought to completely rid the cardboard medium of “representation.” He eliminated surface texture and color modulation, an art technique that artificially creates light and shadow to purposefully flatten the painting. Oiticica treated art not as a medium for representation, but instead as an autonomous “concrete” object.

The devastation of World War II fundamentally altered artists’ understanding of representation, as the Holocaust and the rise of the atomic age challenged the ability of traditional artistic forms to communicate the realities of modern life. Artists began to experience deep senses of absurdity and existentialism, leading them to focus on internal emotional truths. Pollock and Rothko, for example, focused on the action of painting itself as a subject. Literal recreations of the external world became inadequate to convey the atrocities of the time. For artists such as Otto Piene, this crisis of representation necessitated not merely a new style, but a new conception of what art could become in the postwar world. Born in Weimar Germany in 1928, Piene was only a teenager when he was drafted into World War II as an anti-aircraft gunner. His time on the front lines shaped his later artistic works, as after the war he created a series of so-called fire paintings, burning liquid solvent over a red-pigmented canvas. The scorched surface of Fire Painting (1967) evokes the same feelings of devastation that Piene saw in artillery fire and explosions of bombs during wartime. The choice that Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury makes to display Fire Painting is certainly a strong one; black burn marks and the solid red eye-catching against the light walls of the gallery, as if one can feel the heat emanating from dropped explosives with every closer step.

But while Piene was forced to fight for Germany, other artists featured in Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury instead based their art on their forced migrations away from war-torn Europe. Romanian-born Jewish artist Hedda Sterne left Bucharest for New York in 1941 after bearing witness to the Bucharest Pogrom and the rise of Nazism in Europe. In her new home, Sterne was featured in exhibitions of the New York School and worked closely with many abstract expressionists, even being featured as the only woman in an image of a group of abstract artists called the Irascible 18.  Although Sterne did not identify as an abstract expressionist, she was influential at the New York School for her use of spray paint as a medium. Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury, however, moves away from some of her more popular works and features Untitled (1950), watercolor on paper. The watercolor application creates bursts of color that somewhat resemble a figure in motion as she explored art in her new urban environment. 

If you’re ever in the area, make sure to visit the Art Institute of Chicago. Right next to the Michigan Avenue entrance, Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury, on view until October 19, reminds us that Abstract Expressionism emerged as a truly global movement in response to a world rebuilding itself after near destruction, becoming the gateway for future artistic movements to center not just the external world, but our interiority as well.