Concrete art in Europe after 1945

The term concrete art was introduced in 1924 by Theo van Doesburg in a manifesto in 1929 when the Art Concret group was founded, an art movement based on mathematical-geometric principles. Concrete art is not abstract in the true sense of the word because it does not abstract anything that exists in material reality, it materializes spiritual things, it has no symbolic meaning and is created more or less purely by geometric construction. According to van Doesburg, “the work of art must be completely conceived and designed in the mind before it is realized. It must contain nothing of the formal reality of nature, the senses and feelings. Lyricism, drama, symbolism and so on must be eliminated. The image must be composed exclusively of plastic elements, i.e., planes and colors. A pictorial element has no meaning other than itself”.

Concrete art (Art Concret) is distinguished from constructivism and abstract art by its scientific approach (especially the study of geometric laws), its emphasis on the interaction of form and color and the meaning of color. Concrete art does not represent an abstracted or symbolist representation of reality (i.e., it is not the same as abstract art; in abstract art there is a clear relationship to visible reality). Often simple basic geometric shapes are important. However, the use of such elements is not unique to or a necessary part of concrete artworks. The term concrete art is used primarily for works from the German-speaking cultural area, although there is of course much art made worldwide that corresponds to concrete art.

It is typical of artists of concrete art that their works are usually created in the mind before they are materialized. In extreme cases, the principles of their creation are so strictly pre-formulated in the mind that they can be rendered almost like mathematical formulas, this encourages the creation of entire series of works. The philosopher Max Bense made an important contribution to the theoretical underpinnings of concrete art and poetry, especially in Germany.

Thus, the essence of concrete art is formed by the autonomy of pictorial means. The world represented is composed of planes, space, lines, color, bright versus dark, light and movement. The second characteristic of concrete art is its calculability; showing symmetry, rotation, serial order, in short, its affinity with mathematics. The pictorial effects, by the way, despite the logical reasoning, are often surprising and unpredictable.

Kandinsky and Mondrian were important pioneers of concrete art. However, their work was based on the idea that painting can be an abstraction, their work may refer less and less to nature, but the work does not belong to the category of concrete art.

German Josef Albers makes a transition between the prewar and postwar periods in his work. He studied and taught at Bauhaus from 1920 until the institute closed in 1933. In 1933, Albers went to the U.S. where he began teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, founded in 1933 (the institute existed until 1957); Albers was instrumental in the development of Abstract Expressionism in particular. He invited other artists to come and teach during the summer months, such as painters Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell.

Albers became most famous with the series of paintings Homage to the Square (actually an homage to color) that he made starting in 1949 (he worked on this series for 15 years). The paintings consist of squares placed inside each other, each with a different color. Albers made a total of more than 1,000 paintings according to this concept. He tried to study the interaction between different colors with these works. The way you see or experience a color depends on the colors around it. Moreover, a depth effect is created where some squares seem to come forward.

The Swiss, as a neutral country in World War II, were able to continue on the development begun in Bauhaus; redesigning the entire environment of man. The Allianz artist group was founded in 1937 as an association of modern Swiss artists by Richard Paul Lohse and Leo Leuppi. The artist group was oriented to the Zürcher Schule der Konkreten inspired by Max Bill who in 1936 recorded his idea of Konkreter Kunst in an exhibition catalog published by the Kunsthaus Zürich. The members of the Swiss school focused mainly on concrete and constructivist art, but representatives of surrealism and late cubism were also active in the group; their works were also included in the group exhibitions. The first group exhibition of concrete art in Switzerland took place in 1938 at the Kunsthalle Basel, the last in 1954 at the Helmhaus in Zurich. The ideas of Swiss artists were followed abroad. In France, artists, there called geometric abstraction, opt art and kinetic art, grouped around the Galerie Denise René in Paris.

Max Bill writes the first version of a whole series on concrete art in 1936: “Concrete art concerns those works of art which are created on the basis of their own means and laws, that is, without reference to phenomena in nature or transformations of these phenomena, that is, without abstraction.” Bill describes the immediate visualization of an idea by means immanent to the image as a characteristic of concrete art. According to Bill, ultimately every real work of art is not merely a play on given possibilities, but to a much greater extent the manifestation of a particular attitude of mind and worldview. Bill rejects the term subject empty art, because every work of art thematizes an object of representation; according to Bill, this content of the work is the idea, which can be naturalistic, abstract or concrete. So there is no such thing as subject empty art, it would be without content, and consequently it would not be art but “empty decoration” (“Es gibt also kein gegenstandslose Kunst, sie währe denn ohne Inhalt, und infolgendessen wäre es dann auch keine Kunst sondern Leere Dekoration”). Concrete, according to Bill, is a visible object. Concrete art makes thoughts visible by artistic means. The purpose of concrete art is to create physical objects/tools for use by the mind.

According to Bill, there was a strong connection of concrete art with (mathematical) science. However, mathematics was also often at a point where much became unclear to people. He argued that human thought had not hit a limit but that thought needed support in the visual. This support could often be found in art; also for mathematical thinking.

In the 1920s, art that does not start from something that exists in visible reality; a non-figurative way of representation, emerges in various places in Europe. The main movements are De Stijl in the Netherlands, Constructivism in Russia and Bauhaus in Germany. An elementary, geometric vocabulary emerges that does not incorporate natural subjects. The means of representing things become themselves the things to be represented. Van Doesburg, Jean Hélion and others call it “Art Concret” in their 1929 manifesto. Through Hans Arp’s contacts in Paris and Zurich, the theoretical basis of concrete art develops in Switzerland in the 1930s. The creators of concrete art often had to justify themselves. Nice in this is the statement of Alfred Lichtwark (German art historian, one of the founders of museum education and art education): “Man pflegt zu meinen, daß das Kunsturteil in der Anwendung von Erfahrungen und Regeln, die aus den schon vorhandenen Kunstwerken gewonnen sind, auf die werdende oder eben neu gewordene Kunst besteht. In der Tat lassen sich die allermeisten fehlerhaften Urteile darauf zurückführen, daß vom Neuen eine Wiederholung des Alten erwartet wird”.

Critics also often see concrete art as the result of intuition. The artists themselves refer to their art’s affinity with modern science.

In the second half of the 1950s we see the rise of Tachism in Paris (and, for example, informal art in 1959 in the Netherlands); non-figurative abstract painting that uses mainly gestural and impasto application of paint in the spontaneous act of painting (Tapies, Hartung). The tachists are contrasted with the concreteists, with concrete art already seen as traditional modern art in Switzerland, while the tachists, the postwar art movement of the Wirtschaftswunder and high industrialization, is seen as a response to Mondrian and to the supposedly fixed systems of concrete art.

Lohse does not use the term concrete after 1960. He uses the term constructive art. Lohse sees the constructive as a clear dividing line with tachist art, which he refers to as mythological.

Richard Paul Lohse works with terms that accurately describe the system of his creative constructions. The two main groups of works are serial and modular arrangements. The premise is that the work itself is and remains structure. The idea of structure is presented in a way that is consistently comprehensible to the viewer. The formal framework of a coordinate system of identical squares forms a flat overall structure, where color sequences in the sense of a spectral progression; the series, permeate the picture plane as a complex network of relationships between color and form. An example belonging to this working group is Fünfzehn systematische Farbreihen mit vertikaler und horizontaler Verdichtung(https://www.juergen-roth.de/dynageo/kunst/kunst04.html. On display at the museum Kulturspeicher: https://www.kulturspeicher.de/). An example that belongs to the working group modular arrangement is Diagonal von Gelb über grün zu Rot: Within the formal framework of nine equal squares, color contrasts are arranged axially symmetrically or diagonally and create numerous color relationships with their adjacent colors. The work has a hermetic character. She develops her design principle exclusively from the positioning of the colors with their specific mobility. Lohse calls the resulting dynamic possibilities of movement a module.

Lauter M. et al (2002). Konkrete Kunst in Europa nach 1945. Hatje Cantz Verlag.