Dropping resemblance lets the artist work on what cannot be depicted

The argument

Proponents of this account start from a limit built into representational painting. A picture of a thing is answerable to that thing: the viewer checks the image against what it shows, and the painter's decisions about colour, weight and placement are constrained by the obligation to keep the likeness intact. Much of what interests a painter, on this view, lies outside that obligation: the way one colour alters another placed beside it, the pull of a diagonal, the sensation of a rhythm or an interval, the feeling of space with nothing in it. These are not things that can be shown by depicting something else; they have to be presented directly. Abstraction is described as the method that makes that possible. Once a painting is not required to resemble anything, every element in it is free to be adjusted for what it does rather than for what it stands for, and the artist can test relations that no subject would permit. Proponents argue that this is why abstract work is so often made in series: the artist alters one thing at a time and watches what changes, which is a procedure of looking rather than of illustration. The purpose, on this account, is perceptual discovery. The abstract painter is not withholding a subject but working on a region of experience that lies beyond the tangible world of nameable things, what is sensed rather than what is seen, and what arises between elements rather than within any one of them. Proponents conclude that abstract art exists because there is something to be found there, and because the only instrument that reaches it is a work which has given up the duty to resemble.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the account proves too much and explains too little. Representational painters have always worked on colour relation, rhythm and the sensation of space while keeping a subject, so the freedom claimed for abstraction is a matter of degree rather than a new faculty: the subject constrains some decisions and supplies others. They add that calling abstraction a form of perception invites a question it does not answer, since if the work discovers something there ought to be some way of telling a discovery from an arbitrary arrangement, and the account offers none. On that view abstraction is better described as one option among the devices available to a painter than as the purpose of a whole body of art.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The obligation to resemble is weaker than the premise suggests, since representational painters routinely distort colour, scale and placement for effect while keeping the subject recognisable. [Rejecting P2] Colour interaction, rhythm and spatial sensation are all at work in figurative painting, so they do not require the removal of the subject in order to be presented. [Rejecting P3] Freedom to adjust every element is also freedom from any check on the adjustment, so what it secures is latitude rather than discovery. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that abstraction gives the artist a particular kind of latitude, not that perceiving beyond the tangible is the purpose of abstract art.