10:30-10:45

Welcome and introduction
Sophie Howarth, Tate Modern and Gill Perry, Senior Lecturer in Art History at The Open University

10:45-11:15

An introduction to the idea of abstract art

Paul Wood, Senior Lecturer in Art History at The Open University
The paper will consider the roots of the first wave of abstraction in Symbolism, and how it tended to be theorised by Modernist writers, including Alfred Barr. It will also cover the role of Cubism in helping to realise a fully abstract art, with particular reference to Mondrian and Malevich, as well as exceptions to that rule, such as Kandinsky. The paper will consider the contrast between idealist and materialist ideas about abstraction, with reference to the Russian avant-garde. Finally it will describe a 'second wave' of 'informal' abstraction of which Abstract Expressionism was part.
Suggested Further Reading:
- John Golding, Paths to the Absolute, Thames and Hudson, 2000
- Paul Wood and Charles Harrison (eds.) Art in Theory 1900-1990, Blackwell, 1992

11:15-11:45

Reading, Seeing, Reading Seeing

Mark Godfrey, Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Art
This paper will consider some ways in which Barnett Newman's abstraction has been interpreted. First, there are those who read it, as if it were a code to be deciphered (Thomas Hess). Then there are those who 'see' it, and locate the meaning of the work in the seeing experience (Fried, Judd, Bois, Serra, Sylvester). After looking in detail at these accounts, the paper will consider more broadly the importance of an abstraction whose meaning lies in how it structures seeing.
Suggested Further Reading:
- Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (MoMA and Tate, 1970)
- Michael Fried, passage on Newman from 'Three American Painters' in Fried's collection Art and Objecthood, University of Chicago Press, 1998
- Donald Judd, 'Barnett Newman' in Complete Writings (New York, 1975) (This is also anthologised in many books)
- Barnett Newman interview with David Sylvester in Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley, 1992)
- Yve-Alain Bois, Perceiving Newman in Painting as Model, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. 1990

11:45 - 12:15

Hearsay, Rumours, Bed-sit Dreamers and Art Begins Today

Phyllida Barlow, artist and Head of Undergraduate Sculpture, Slade School of Art
Investigating abstraction as a force in British sculpture, this paper will focus on the 1965 New Generation Sculpture Exhibition, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It will also be more personally about Barlow's experience of abstract sculpture, as a sculptor, from the 1960s to the present day. The paper will address the influence of American art of the 1950s and 1960s, including the work of Barnett Newman, on redefining British sculpture. It will conclude with a brief summary of what Barlow considers to be the significant influences on sculpture in the last decade, and which seem to contrast, in a conservative way, with the impact initiated previously.
Suggested further reading:
- The New Generation exhibition catalogue, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1965
- Early One Morning exhibition catalogue, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2002

12:15-12:40

Panel discussion, with audience intervention
Phyllida Barlow, Paul Wood and Mark Godfrey, chaired by Gill Perry

14:00 - 14:05

Introduction to Session 2
Sophie Howarth, Tate Modern

14:05-14:30

Barnett Newman and the Evocation of the Sublime

Jason Gaiger, Lecturer in Art History at Doncaster College and the Open University.
In an important essay, The Sublime is Now, written in 1948, Barnett Newman rejected the search for beauty in favour of "man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relation to the absolute emotions". Whilst acknowledging that he lived in an age that lacked suitable myths and legends, he claimed that a new presentation of the sublime could be achieved without employing the traditional devices of Western painting, or what he termed 'the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth.' This paper will consider the relation of Newman's work to the philosophical tradition of the sublime, including authors such as Longinus, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant, and consider the extent to which Newman's fully abstract painting can succeed in generating an experience of the sublime.
Suggested further reading:
- Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now, first published in Tiger's Eye, Vol. 1, No.6, December 1948, most readily accessible in Harrison and Wood, eds. Art in Theory, pp. 572-4.
- Longinus, On the Sublime, transl. W.H. Fyfe, Cambridge Mass./London: LOEB Classical Library, 1995, especially section 35.
- Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), especially Part II (A good modern edition is edited by Adam Phillips, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
- Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (1790), sections 23-29. (The best modern translation is by Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1987).

14:30-15:00

Experience and Interpretation

Jane Burton, Curator of Interpretation, Tate Modern
Galleries and museums are no longer just repositories for artefacts, they are sites of experience and education where the mind is engaged as much as the eye. While most curators accept the need to supply information to help gallery visitors decode certain forms of realist art - the cast of characters in an allegorical painting for instance - there remains a belief amongst many arts professionals that understanding abstraction is essentially a process of private communion between the viewer and the work, and that explanatory material is an unnecessary distraction. This attitude fails to recognise that, for the non-specialist audience, abstract works can be remarkably silent when left to speak for themselves.
Taking the current Barnett Newman exhibition as its focus, this paper seeks to unravel some of the possible interpretative approaches to Newman's art, both in his lifetime and today. It looks at the debates in the press about interpretation surrounding the opening of Tate Modern, and outlines some of the ways in which abstract art has complicated the interpretative process, by incorporating both the viewer's physical and psychological responses and the architectural space of the gallery in its scope. Finally it asks what kind of strategies museums of modern art could employ to make visitors conscious of the partiality of curatorial presentation, as traditional methods of display, relating to chronology, movement and style, fall out of fashion.
Suggested further reading:
- Barnett Newman, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Museum of Art/ Tate, 2002

15:00-15:30

News From Nowhere

Jonathan Jones, Guardian writer
Abstract art is the opposite of what you might call a good news story. Good stories are precise, they have characters, they can be told quickly. None of which abstraction delivers. Yet surprisingly, some of the biggest news splashes in the history of modern art have been concerned with abstraction, from Whistler's court case against Ruskin after the critic denounced him for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face to Jackson Pollock's appearance in Life magazine. Some of the best writing on abstract art, too, has been published in a journalistic context, notably Clement Greenberg's articles in the left wing American magazine The Nation in the 1940s. What all this might lead us to speculate is that abstract art has been far more self-conscious in its dealings with the mass media than it wants us to think; that far from a pristine spiritual phenomenon, it is a historical, contingent, even "journalistic" one.
At the same time, there is a tension between the empirical, sceptical tendencies of newspaper art criticism and the subversive anti-empiricism of abstract art; one of the most tempting stances for the critic of this stuff is that of the bluff cynic who admits to not being moved at all by Rothko or whoever. This kind of writing on abstract art is the clichéd antithesis of the equally unconvincing interpretations of abstract art by its champions; the rhetoric of spirituality, portentousness, utopia. Is it possible to write well about abstract art at all? Here we might look again at the 1940s writings of Clement Greenberg.
Suggested further reading:
- Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism / edited by John O'Brian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. vol. 1. Perceptions and judgements, 1939-1944; vol. 2. Arrogant purpose, 1945-1949; vol. 3. Affirmations and refusals, 1950-1956; vol. 4. Modernism with a vengeance, 1957-1969.

15:30-16:00

Panel discussion, with audience intervention
Jason Gaiger, Jonathan Jones, Jane Burton chaired by Sophie Howarth