Product Description

"What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the last five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in Art and Illusion, another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death.

With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55997 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Review
"... a provocative defense of modern abstraction by the late Kirk Varnedoe, former curator at the Museum of Modern Art." -- Edward J. Sozanski, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"...is a clear-eyed, eloquently plain-spoken, unfaltering guide through the thickets of drip painting, minimalism, and more." -- Nancy Tousley, The Calgary Herald

"A book that everyone with a serious interest in modern art will want to read". -- Hilton Kramer, The Wall Street Journal

"But unlike many defenders of abstraction, Varnedoe was never besotted with academic theory." -- Daniel A. Siedell, Christianity Today

"With short bios of artists and telling anecdotes, he answers for us, in highly readable prose." -- The Star-Ledger

Review
With the publication of Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock by Kirk Varnedoe, we have a welcome reminder of the high esteem that abstract art came to enjoy in its heyday. . . . Pictures of Nothing, based on a series of lectures that Mr. Varnedoe gave at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is a book that everyone with a serious interest in modern art will want to read, and it has the additional merit of being well-written and excellently illustrated.
(Hilton Kramer Wall Street Journal )

Pictures of Nothing [is] the transcribed text of one-time MoMA chief curator Kurt Varnedoe's final lectures. . . . [T]he talks are not just for Varnedoe completists--they tackle the question 'What is abstract art good for?' and constitute the charismatic scholar's final word on the subject.
(ArtNet.com )

Your favorite realist's eyes might suddenly pop open after reading Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock by Kirk Varnedoe. . . . The art historian . . . is a clear-eyed, eloquently plain-spoken, unfaltering guide through the thickets of drip painting, minimalism, and more. Why abstraction? Look here for an answer.
(Nancy Tousley Calgary Herald )

The knowledge that this would be Varnedoe's last public appearance brought a plainspoken urgency to the lectures that's carried over to this transcribed and edited text.
(Peter Goddard Toronto Star )

Varnedoe's enthusiastic insights fill the pages. Through his descriptions, bare, arbitrary or seemingly interchangeable works start to bristle with distinctiveness. . . . His vision of America's abstract half-century in Pictures of Nothing is . . . eclectic and embracing.
(Edmund Fawcett RA Magazine )

[These] lectures are remarkably fresh and conversational--not only because Varnedoe did not have a chance to edit and revise them, but also because he gave these lectures, as he did every other lecture, entirely from memory. . . . Varnedoe's lectures reveal the positive role of abstract art in modern cultural life. . . . Varnedoe insists; abstract art is difficult, it takes practice to understand, and if it is governed by rules that appear arbitrary, that only makes it like every other cultural practice.
(Daniel A. Siedell Christian Today )

Kirk Varnedoe's book . . . confronts the central question of modernism: How are people supposed to understand pictures that appear to be self-referential?
(Philadelphia Inquirer )

Readable and elucidated by well-chosen examples that help illustrate changing trends in a fast-paced time.
(Globe and Mail )

Kirk Varneode begins by pointing out that the development of abstract art coincided with the cataclysm of World War I, which jarred artists into revolutionary forms. . . . [An] extraordinary series of lectures.
(Sheila Farr Seattle Times )

Elegiac, in the truest sense of the term: It is the pensive summation of a career undertaken by a man in the last stages of a devastating illness, and it is, too, the posthumous reckoning of his words by his closest friends. . . . [T]his book is a remarkable trace of its author. . . . He wanted to insist that any art worth looking at had, at least, many stories to tell.
(Aruna D'Souza Bookforum )

Pictures of Nothing examines how, while names like Pollock, Mondrian and de Kooning are immediately recognized for their significance in modern culture, the importance of depicting squares or splattered paint is not as widely understood. With humor and candor, Varnedoe illuminates the meaning behind nonrepresentational works of the past 50 years--the contradictory intentions of Josef Albers's and Carl Andre's shared geometry or the minute artistic details of Robert Smithson's massive Spiral Jetty.
(Museum News )

An eminently readable, deeply insightful book.
(Christopher Knight Los Angeles Times )

Varnedoe is a pragmatist. To those who would say that abstract art is a classic case of the emperor's new clothes, he simply says that it has been around for more than a century and that is proof enough of its efficacy. What he wants is not to validate what artists have been doing all this time but, rather, to find cogent ways of talking about it and, hence, a deeper understanding. . . . What this wonderful book shows is that although the original motivations behind abstract art were puritanical, crypto-religious or collectivist, it has flourished as a series of secular, diverse, individualistic, private visions. Society thrives, Varnedoe bravely suggests, when it gives free play to these visions, even those that initially seem absurd, banal or hermetic.
(Sebastian Smee The Australian )

A provocative defense of modern abstraction. . . . Varnedoe's analysis of abstraction, using specific works, helps make sense of various approaches to non-representational art.
(Edward J. Sozanski Journal Sentinel Online )

Expressed in vivid, accessible, and often passionate language. Varnedoe . . . speaks as a teacher.
(Arthur C. Danto ArtNews )

This is an important time capsule of cultural history, grappling with 60-plus-years' history of abstract art's legacies. . . . [T]his book captures the cadence, energy, and verve characteristic of Varnedoe's immensely effective lectures. . . . Erudite in all the best ways, this book is also deeply human, born of love for the experience of art. . . . Highly recommended.
(Choice )

Review
Varnedoe was an especially distinguished and influential curator and interpreter of modern art, and this book, in effect, is his last testament. It is in the analysis of specific works of art or bodies of work by a specific artist that Varnedoe shines, reflecting his long career of intimate study of art objects. He is commenting on some of the most challenging of artists, the likes of Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and other innovators in abstraction of various kinds. There are some truly refreshing moments where Varnedoe has the courage of his convictions and explains why one artist of merit should receive more of our attention than another artist of merit-in effect, distinguishing between greater and lesser merit, rather than just good or bad.
(Richard Shiff, University of Texas )

Customer Reviews

The Voice of the Master Aesthete
Three months before his untimely death from cancer, Kirk Varnedoe, former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, delivered the 2003 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington. This beautifully designed book represents a careful transcription of the tapes and videos made during a bravura performance; it reads as if Varnedoe had actually had an opportunity to edit the material but sadly this was not to be the case. The highly readable finish of the text is entirely due to Varnedoe's extraordinary skill as a public speaker, a teacher who spoke in perfectly edited paragraphs with nothing but an outline and his slides before him. His love of art, his verbal wit, his lack of condescension to his audience all come through on the page; the voice that became so familiar to millions through his many televised appearances echoes as you read his words. His theme, the history of Abstract Art since Pollock, was chosen in specific response to the famous Mellon lectures on representational art delivered by EH Gombrich fifty years before. Varnedoe is never doctrinaire in his artistic choices or his angle of analysis; Pictures of Nothing is a wonderful introduction to a subject that often perplexes the general reader.

Varnedoe trained in an era when the importance of the art object and the personal response it evoked retained primacy over the gathering obfuscations of theory; his close reading of major works is never less than revelatory, in particular his encounters with the paintings of Jasper Johns and the sculptures of Richard Serra. His comparisons of objects from the hands of different artists is always apposite and sometimes surprising in an aha sort of way or "why didn't I think of that?"; for example, how Philip Taafe makes use of the Madame Torso motif in a Hans Arp relief. The six chapters follow the order of the six lectures. His chapter on the abstract elements in the work of Warhol and Lichtenstein is particularly good and he has many new things to say about Gerhard Richter. Varnedoe is best when discussing art that still falls under the umbrella of Modernism (c.1970); the closer he comes to the present era, the shakier his choices become. He is eager to point out how thin the line is between representation and absraction but does not discuss de Kooning much, nor does he quote his famous statement that every abstraction must have a resemblance. Varnedoe closes with a statement of faith in works of art and abstraction in particular; his last words are painfully apt, "And now, I am done."

Spirited defense of abstract art
The book is an excellent introduction to contemporary art for non-specialists. It's the best, least doctrinaire, most convincing case for abstract art that I've ever encountered. Varnedoe supports his case superbly with close readings of dozens of works illustrated throughout the book. He's a fine, sensitive, appreciative critic and just to read his appreciations and analyses of these works an education in contemporary art. Most authors who write about abstract art (or modern art, interchangeable terms for present purposes) direct their books either to its champions or its critics. Varnedoe has written a book about abstract art for the rest of us, who mostly are not sure what to think of it.

Varnedoe thinks it's good and important for several reasons. First, because it suits our restless, ever-changing reality, crossing every boundary seeking something new and better. Second, it offers individuals freedom not just to express themselves but to create new visual languages that expand expressive possibilities for everybody. Third, because it explores the "borderland around the opening into nothingness" by casting out already formulated images in favor of pure shape, color, texture reduced to their essence and presented for our unmediated perception. Last, and most fundamentally, because it persists: "It has been done. It is being done...and... it will be done." There must be something worthwhile here if so many talented people over so long a time spend their lives in the enterprise of abstract art.

If only he had had enough time to engage in a dialogue with skeptics. Varnedoe addresses realism briefly when he rejects the thesis that the conventions of realism developed in the West since the Renaissance (perspective, light and shade defining form,...) are somehow natural or hardwired in humans. What is hardwired, Varnedoe claims, is communication, negotiation, invention, but not any one visual code. Fair enough. But this one counter argument to but one rationale for realism hardly justifies dismissing a tradition that has spanned 500 years, dozens of cultures, and countless masterpieces.

Despite Varnedoe's spirited defence, I'm left still wondering. Are the new resources of visual expression created by, for instance, embalmed sheep and steel cubes, really that rich? Richer than art created by contemporary realists who depict people, scenes, and situations in highly meaningful ways, far beyond the veiled and arguable meanings of most abstract works, and are also beautiful as two-dimensional surfaces?

But I fear that the merits of the case do not matter. Realism is old fashioned, a fatal flaw in our novelty-seeking culture that Varnedoe rightly recognizes as the audience and market for abstract art. The rest of us will have to learn to like it. And there's much to like, as Varnedoe shows us in this book.

Certainly about something!
One should not be deterred by the silly title, for this book is about something important indeed. In my view the development of abstraction is the most significant development in the visual arts over the last 100 years. To be sure, Varnedoe deals only with the second half, the era since Pollock, but that is the portion that most of us have experienced. If you are still puzzled by abstract art, this inviting, accessible volume is the book for you. Also, in reading it one has the sense of participating in a tribute to its gifted author, who died of cancer three months after completing the lectures. His friends have done a remarkable job of editing.

I have two criticisms, though. 1) A pragmatist, Varnedoe eschewed grand theories, holding that the vital matter lay in the details. Yet he moves swiftly from one object to another. Anyone who has attempted to teach this subject (as I have) knows how important it is to avoid the habit of skipping from flower to flower. It would have been helpful if Varnedoe had devoted at least one lecture to only two or three objects, showing how they work in detail. 2) The text is mainly about American abstract art. Only a few Europeans get a look in, and that is because the remind the author of some American work. Many of us can remember a time when European artists like Soulages, Hartung, and Fautrier were spoken in the same breath as the American abstract expressionists. There are many other European abstractionists who are worthy of attention. But Varnedoe has reinforced the stereotype that the first fifty years of abstraction belong to Europe, the second fifty years to the US.

Still, this is a beautiful book and I expect to return to it often.