ways of seeing differently

modernist art, photographic reproduction, and change

It is still, just about, a nice evening. It is mid-July — past mid-July — and summer still hasn’t got going. I’m sitting outside, regretting the overconfident flip-flops and the tank top, the suncream I applied at 7.30pm, hopefully. The pale hairs on my arms are standing to attention. I haven’t tanned this year. Two old ladies behind me are discussing the clematis, the roses which still haven’t bloomed. There’s a burst of fuchsia in a pot to my right. As a child I thought they looked like fairies floating down from the sky, now I think they look like labia. They’re the colour of strawberry ice cream. I reflect, glumly, that it is not warm enough for ice cream.

I have told myself that I am going to write something this evening, something of import, something that matters. A pitch, or a funding application, or something I might actually get paid for. Instead I have sat down and started composing what feels like the beginning of a diary entry straight into the Substack editor.

I leave my full-time job in two weeks time. By the time this goes out, time has nibbled away at that number and almost swallowed it up altogether. I am excited for what comes next, but also anxious about the hazy, liminal period between leaving the gallery and starting my DPhil in the Autumn. The worry is existential as well as financial, social. I’ve spent the past year surrounded by art, and returning to academia holds the promise of days spent in the library, enmeshed in the web of the past. The two months in between are a strange stop-gap, the preliminary phantom ache of a tooth I know I’m about to lose but which will, like a shark’s, grow back stranger.

It is perhaps not unrelated that I’ve been thinking recently about the act of looking, seeing, and how we compose our realities, both as individuals and as a culture. These are questions integral to both the historian’s profession and to that of the artist and critic. The critic John Berger famously wrote that ‘every image embodies a way of seeing’, a particular attitude or orientation to the world is contained within its composition. For Berger, for example, the Western tradition of oil painting incarnated a particular relation towards property and ownership, a relation fundamental to the capitalist spirit. Thus an eighteenth-century oil painting of an overflowing table or a field of livestock or a naked woman is not just a depiction of its subject, but a depiction of an object which could be bought, sold, or owned within the mechanics of capital and social power.

For Berger as for many critics, it was modernism which split this tradition wide open at the dawn of the nineteenth century, as guns and bombs and planes were busy splitting the world wide open too. It is so easy to have a gut reaction to modernist art, its varied forms of abstraction. To say ‘I could paint that’ or ‘my kid could do that’ or ‘who would buy that’ (note the slip of property and propriety into the casual observer’s gaze). It is too easy to forget its radicalism, its disjointing power over a stultified establishment and an oil painting tradition Berger defines as broadly 'a celebration of material property and of the status that accompanied it’. To go against the gut reaction, to press against the easy softness to the hard core beneath, the bedrock composition of the world. Though, it could be argued, mainstream modernist art never pressed hard enough.

I’m on the threshold of something at the moment. I can feel that, especially now, sat outside at twilight, though I can’t quite identify what the threshold is nor what lies over it. It’s a strange space to be, the threshold. It’s a crepuscular space, rich with connectivity, with things which spill over their bounds and slip back into the past or forwards to the future. The yellow Buck Moon rising tonight is the same colour as the glow of the dusk-lamp on the garden path, and the reflection of a bright window opposite on the river’s calm water. The clambering rose thorns and the single soft fist at the top invite mystery, magic, something more than the simple process of plants growing and flowering and eventually dying back. The river is low, but tomorrow it will be high tide and the banks at risk of flooding. It is a strange space, the threshold, its stitched together root and suffix, which clasp their hands around you and hold you loosely in the middle, rocking between fingers.

It is so easy to look at your life in a limited, linear way, as a series of steps towards particular goals, a mechanical — and metaphysical, in our twenty-first century parlance — grinding away. The threshold is both a part of this linearity and apart from it. In the first instance, it implies a forward progression, a stepping through or transition from one state into another. Yet the threshold is also a state itself. Whilst perhaps overused online, liminality, a word drawn from the Latin word for threshold, refers in anthropology to the transformative, ambiguous mid-state of a rite of passage. According to anthropologists and historians, the threshold was and still is a space of ritual and ceremony — the carrying of brides and the hanging of horseshoes. To exist in a threshold is to exist both within and without of time, perpetually on the edge of something new but with one eye cast back towards the past. The whole pre-war phase of modernism can be seen as a kind of threshold, hung between a crumbling old world and the violences which would drag it into some sort of future. Hence the formal ingenuity, the striving to make sense of a senseless world, or at least to give that senselessness shape.

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Not long ago, on entering the second room of an exhibition of modernist works, a painting immediately caught my eye. A jewel-toned explosion of colour and shape, yet each form laid down with the fine-tuned precision of a concert hall conductor. I worked my way round to it slowly, looking at its neighbours first, waiting for the older man in front of it to shuffle on before I approached it frontal, my eyes wide.

From a distance, the interplay of dark and light, shape and emptiness, had made the painting feel like a modern Caravaggio. Up close, it unfurled new features and tones. A mottled patch of green like rain-damaged brass or the surface of one of Jupiter’s moons, a tiny black rectangle with a fine rim, flecks of paint like dust caught in the varnish, and the rugged texture of that gold curve sweeping across the work’s centre line. On closer inspection, an irregular shape under the arch of gold took more concrete form. It was a book, I realised with a jolt, a book or a scroll or a little scrappy fragment of paper, the sort you might use as a reminder or a bookmark in a larger tome. The text was in Yiddish. I didn’t understand it, but I wanted instantly to know what it might say. Composition, the work was called — an abstract composition by El Lissitzky, a Jewish-Russian artist working at the start of the nineteenth-century who also designed Soviet propaganda posters in the Suprematist style. Composition is such a neutral word, attentive truly to shape and form and colour and light. It is a word which resists interpretation yet this was a work which opened up so many possibilities of understanding, suggested so many new ways of seeing.

Is it a house, as that tiny dark window to the right of the painting might suggest? A crowded work-surface or reading table? A collection of papers and books, caught in the act of falling? What is that jagged white shape which cuts through the painting like a bloodied knife? Is it day or night or something else altogether? And what does the Yiddish text say? The painting felt to me like a moment of revelation, bright bars of light descending onto the words amidst the image, or perhaps emanating up from them. It felt like opening a book to exactly the right page, or like an intake of breath.

Standing in front of Lissitzky’s Composition, I had that sense of accessing the sublime which sometimes strikes you in front of a work of art. The feeling of being caught, snared by the work, the sense that if I kept looking I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from leaning further and further inwards until I finally fell.

El Lissitzky (1890-1941), Composition, circa 1918-1920s. Oil on canvas. 58 x 71 cm. National Art Museum of Ukraine

After a few minutes, I moved off to the right, to the next work on the wall, and cast a final longing glance back at Composition. Suddenly, it snagged me again. What moments ago had been a book unfurling, and before that nothing but colour and shape, looked just like a face! A narrow, angular little face, peering sideways to meet my gaze. Look at you, it seemed to say. Look at you, looking at me. Making assumptions about what I am and what you are.

To access the sublime and then still be surprised.

I took a photo of Composition, cringing at myself as I did so. I want to remember it, I justified, I want to revisit it and I’ll probably want to write about it. As was to be expected, the photograph came out poorly. Looking at it now, I feel a twinge of emotion, a catching of breath, but nothing like the outpouring before the real thing. Reproductions online are even worse, flattening out its chiaroscuro and contours. And yet unless I return to the exhibit before it closes its doors, this is what I am stuck with. By photographing the painting I have both ensured that I remember it, and tainted my memory of it forever.

In Ways of Seeing, Berger asks what gives the original of a painting its value in the age of photography. Writing in 1972, long before the dawn of phone photography, with its instantaneous press and capture, Berger argues that photography destroys an image’s uniqueness and singularity of meaning, fracturing it into multiple meanings and leading to a focus on what the original image is (an ‘authentic’ work of art with ‘market value’) rather than what it says. Reproducing images free of context, cutting them loose from the physical artefact of their presence, makes them a part of this system of information and exchange, coopting their meanings. Against this modern use of art, Berger argues for a new way of seeing, in which images can help define ‘the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents’.

To Berger, art is deeply, inescapably political. A gut-reflex hatred of modern art is a way of seeing — or perhaps a way of not-seeing — which shuts down meaning and experience and the possibility of change. Though I do not find it surprising that this reflex thrives on social media. There is something missing in the reproductions of the image, something which fails to ignite. It is understandable that a Rothko does not resonate when it is seen on an iPhone screen, despite their purported psychological power, though it is less understandable when it generates years worth of online discourse. It is hard to define that missing thing, which draws you onto the threshold and outside of time and into history. Berger’s argument draws heavily from that of Walter Benjamin, who theorised that mechanical reproduction could never capture the ‘aura’ of a work, its tangible presence in space and time and the histories imbued within. The composition of a painting is more than just its physical form, or its authentic status as a work touched by a particular artist. It is something more than that, something surprising and undefinable as I felt before the Lissitzky, a little-known work in an exhibition I had simply wandered into on my lunch break.

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I associate the word ‘composition’ almost entirely with modernism in its various forms, from theatre to music to dance, the artistic isms which flared and withered in the turbulence of the first half of the twentieth century. It lends itself to Piet Mondrian’s pure abstractions, to the Russian Constructivists like Lissitzky and to the Cubists and the Expressionists, and it is a word particularly linked with Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky’s ten Composition paintings, of which three were destroyed during the Second World War, were considered by both the artist and his biographers as his most important works. The connection with musicality in the title ‘composition’ is no mistake. For Kandinsky, music and painting shared a deep and important relationship, and artists must seek to ‘apply the methods of music’ to their own art.

With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

In his revolutionary 1912 manifesto ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, Kandinsky argued that all art served a spiritual purpose within the universe, elevating human life ‘forwards and upwards’. Music’s innate abstraction, its failure to ever truly replicate naturalistic forms, provided a benchmark for his own theory of abstraction, in which colour and form must give ‘outward expression of…inner meaning’ and call forth ‘corresponding vibrations of the soul’, elevating humanity beyond purely material concerns. The atonal musicality of Kandinsky’s vast Compositions, which are both chaotic and harmonious, represent his attempt to realise these spiritual principles in painting. I find them both overwhelming and soothing, confusing yet strangely familiar — a common experience, if the comments on the official Kandinsky website are anything to go by.

If the radical claims of 1912 that abstract art could elevate human life to a new state of renewal crumbled in the face of two world wars, the effect of the works has not. ‘Corresponding vibrations of the soul’ is what I felt in front of the Lissitzky, it is what I feel in front of Kandinsky’s Composition VII, painted shortly before the outbreak of the Great War and often considered his most vital work, a turbulent yet totalising expression of his spiritual principles. It is hard to capture these ‘vibrations’ in a photographic reproduction, yet one might access them unexpectedly in a gallery, or whilst lonely at twilight on a cool summer evening, observing the world as a series of softened abstractions, freed by the changes of the light from the constraints of making sense of it all.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII, 1913. Oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Kandinsky’s work appears in another London gallery, as part of a display of Expressionist works by The Blue Rider, the circle of his friends and collaborators who created together in the fertile years before the War. The Blue Rider was named after a common motif in Kandinsky and Franz Marc’s work, the horse and rider, and the colour blue, which Kandinsky described in ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ as the most ‘heavenly’ of colours. Wandering through the show, I found myself contrasting the optimistic ecstasy of Kandinsky’s shift to abstraction and his Theosophical views about the spiritual ascent of man through art with the looming spectre of the War, the death and later persecution members of the group would face, their works eventually labelled ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazi regime. To label such works ‘degenerate’ is the extreme end of the gut reflex against abstraction, a tightening up and closing off rather than opening up to possibility of a work which defies easy representation, a reflex with disturbing consequences. I worry, when I see young people on TikTok and Twitter refusing to engage with art they do not immediately understand, shutting down engagement to call it pretentious or ugly, as if — as Berger reminds us — simplicity and beauty have ever been uncomplicated values. I worry because of the fascism lurking unacknowledged in the shadows, but also because of the simple laziness of this way of seeing both art and the world more generally.

The rejection of challenging art contains within it the implication that everything must provide instant gratification, a pleasurable hit as easily obtained and ingested as a soda or a Like on Instagram. You do not need to get closer to such pleasurable things, to reassess them from every angle or to hang them upside down, an act which supposedly introduced Kandinsky to the potential powers of abstraction to defy the world’s supposed order. As Kandinsky himself wrote, ‘as art becomes more difficult, its wealth of expression in form becomes greater and greater’. I am not saying life should be hard, or challenging, but I am suggesting that a particular closed-off way of engaging with art reflects a closed-off attitude to potentialities and diversity and strangeness in the world beyond the gallery. It is political as well as aesthetic, this business of looking and not looking. El Lissitzky’s final work was a propaganda poster against the Nazis; Kandinsky died in exile in Paris, after the Nazi campaign against the Bauhaus movement. 

All acts of looking are acts of composition, conscious or unconscious. We choose what to include and what to exclude, within the limits prescribed by our cultures. And in doing so we limit ourselves, we put blinkers over our eyes. I worry that I wear such blinkers, sitting in the July darkness, wondering what to write, worrying about publication and acceptance and analytics and my career, all these words which my fingers itch to capitalise, which seem so far from the driving impulse behind my work but which have come to define ít. The artist, says Kandinsky, ‘must be blind to distinctions between “recognised” or “unrecognised” conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular style’, and of course, to the siren-song of fame. ‘He must watch only the trend of the inner need and hearken to its words alone.’ These words give me license and hope. Why should I not just sit in the darkness, hearkening only to the world’s strange music? Here are the connections, the bony elbows of the rosebush, the moon rising above the flats across the river, the tangle of lights on the water below, the not-quite-audible voices drifting from open windows, grateful for the almost-warmth. The sewage smell, the goose-pimples, and the fear which fills me every time my fingers leave the keyboard, the fool’s fear that this is the last time, that I will never write like this again (as if is a bad thing that the Kandinsky of 1921 did not continue to make art like the Kandinsky of 1901, before he hung his painting upside down). 

Writing this is me leaning into the fear, giving myself permission to see it with open eyes. If my career, my life, does not move in a straight line then perhaps it will become something else, something more. Like an artist on the threshold I must be alert to new possibilities of composition, to the new ways of seeing which may be born in each and any moment, when the world cracks open, when it fails to cohere. 

I am scared for what comes next, yes, I am scared. But also— 

Is it not thrilling, to open your eyes a little wider, and ride out on your blue horse into the dusk, the twilit threshold when perception falls apart? Why do we need to know where we are going? 

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This piece grew out of my anxieties about my next two months of unemployment, which I am optimistically referring to as a period of ‘freelancing’ (i.e sending off pitches and praying). As always, I am available for commissions from publications, and particularly welcome suggestions on where to submit. Otherwise, paid subscriptions will be particularly appreciated in the next few months.

And as usual, let me know what you think in the comments — are you a modern art fan, or secretly think you could do it all yourself? I keep my posts free because I love the interactions that can bring!