5/6 The Rules Of Abstraction With Matthew Collings
• 1/6 The Rules Of Abstr...
First broadcast: Sep 2014.
Documentary in which painter and critic Matthew Collings charts the rise of abstract art over the last 100 years, whilst trying to answer a set of basic questions that many people have about this often-baffling art form. How do we respond to abstract art when we see it? Is it supposed to be hard or easy? When abstract artists chuck paint about with abandon, what does it mean? Does abstract art stand for something or is it supposed to be understood as just itself?
These might be thought of as unanswerable questions, but by looking at key historical figures and exploring the private world of abstract artists today, Collings shows that there are, in fact, answers.
Living artists in the programme create art in front of the camera using techniques that seem outrageously free, but through his friendly-yet-probing interview style Collings immediately establishes that the work always has a firm rationale. When Collings visits 92-year-old Bert Irvin in his studio in Stepney, east London he finds that the colourful works continue experiments in perceptual ideas about colour and space first established by abstract art pioneers such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky in the 1910s.
Other historic artists featured in the programme include the notorious Jackson Pollock, the maker of drip paintings, and Mark Rothko, whose abstractions often consist of nothing but large expanses of red. Collings explains the inner structure of such works. It turns out there are hidden rules to abstraction that viewers of this intriguing, groundbreaking programme may never have expected.
By far this is has to be the best series on abstract art/artists, I have learned so much! Thank you so much for this program, truely marvelous and enjoyable.
Painting is an "Introvert's experience in an extrovert's world" - Dan Perfect, Brilliant!!
ha....I love that. Very well put.
Loving this channel and have always loved abstract art. Sad to see so many in this day and age still can't wrap their heads around it. Sad for them, that is.
Well i still dont get it. What i got out of this is that every abstract painting tells a story or shows an emotional state and is completly useless without the context given by the artist. If u dont know who the artist was or when the painting was created its mostly gibberish on a canvas..they seem rather meaningless then
@@eisberg7681you get what you give with abstract art
Thank you so much for this great documentary, very valuable and well done. I keep watching it all over again. Thanks for great examples.
Finally something worth watching! Thank you !!!
Excellent documentary!
gracias nuevamente. excelente
i respect jackson pollocks work, you can feel the movement of painting, nature of paint. splatter, fluidity
enrique guillen I feel the same too
Me too but he did sort of lose it , some of them were horrendous. He died young didn't he? How many had he painted? It felt like it was coming to the end and that's its problem where do you go after that you've got nothing to do.
@@christoph7395 You invent a new art type...
this is very good series of video. i love it. well done
Did I mention I love you? Not Matthew Collings, he's getting a bit sorta scraggy in a sorta nice way I guess, but I love you Art Documentaries. Life wouldn't be the same without you.
andreasinclair OMG...Thanks = Highly Appreciated !! I love U2 !
I'm really sceptical about the whole thing personally Andrea.
@@taran333tula Me too. Although I do think Bono has gotten a wee bit stale. The Edge and the rest of the band are alright. But nothing can truly replace the glory days of the band. Maybe I just miss that. The new music _is_ ok I suppose....
I think I love Mathew Collings. Plus, what a great job he has here! Great documentary. Plus I have discovered new artists here.
Thank you !!!
Popova is excellent, Dan Pefect is damn perfect
Great documentary
Great documentary - love the inclusion of the Russian artists - Andre Lanskoy is one of my favourites.
11:40: WHOA. Dan Perfect.. First time seeing this guy, Wow!!
It's kind of the problem that the people on the inside treat those outside horrendously yet if the excluded are to join them eventually accepting and swallowing down the belligerence of the establishment won't they then be part of the same rotten system? Take it on a case by case basis I suppose.
Appreciate the Moondog music. 👍
Was there some grander plan behind the scenes that we knew nothing of?
After minute ten this artist is doing these great ink stain type effects. What do you think what kind of paint that is? It can’t be oil!?
Does anyone know what music starts at 4:56?
Ornette Coleman - Lonely Woman
@@uzytkownikinternetu4885 I've always associated that song with Pollock and vice versa, strangely.
just marvellous, thanks! what music starts at 1:57? seems very familiar to me. Moondog?
Indeed, Moondog & The London Saxophonic - New Amsterdam
thank you!
Where is the last one?
6/6 is not available on some devices : These can be cellular phones, video game consoles or set-top boxes. (because of audio copyrights claims)
Moondog, somebody in the music department at the BBC knows what’s up!
What a frugal life it was...
oh dear
Covering Tatlin would’ve been helpful.
l learned from this that abstract painting is made by slightly bonkers middle class people. l hope thats not really the case ha
+Needle Factory Good point. All of these contemporary abstractionists seem to be copying what they were taught in college, analyzing the techniques without feeling or believing in anything. No passion.
+Howard Wiggins passion is nothing. how to master it and make it useful is everything.
their passion is expressed in their paintings
Pollock’s nicotine infused madness - same thing happened to me- but I was painting walls in a house and went nuts ….lady changed colors every other day ….
@@howtubeable Fucking stupid
The narrator says, twice, that Pollock has an 'certain architectural aspect' (or words to that effect). But then there is no further comment on that....in what way is Pollock 'architectural" ??? I admire the narrator for trying but he makes no sense
Most constructivists ended up in the Gulags, or in unmarked graves. Russian arts never recovered.
The main, TRUE rule of abstraction is that one should not be able to see any actual physical thing from the objective world. If there are birds or animals or cars or whatever, it's not truly an abstract in the purest sense of the word.
itsALLartVideos if you're a purist, yes. But abstraction is a spectrum, not an on/off switch
Nl’
Paul Tompkins work is so, I don’t know, Grish but ordinary, has work isn’t that great nothing special my work is better than his I know that’s pretty big headed of me but honestly his stuff is a bit garish, the color is just too much and the compositions aren’t really interesting and yet I’m sure he’s had large gallery shows with well-known galleries and has a good career. Totally sucks, if he can be there I can definitely do this
Ads every 5 minutes ruins this series. I'll be looking elsewhere, thanks anyway.
Off you fuck then.
sorry but defending pollock is a bit like jumpin the shark on this series
Whether you like Pollock or not, you’ve got to talk about him. He opened things up, blew out the walls, put the pedal to the metal.
I hate being negative, but this look at abstraction is completely incomprehensible to me, E=MC^2 is abstract, abstraction is when you find a way to convey reality into some sort of form that creates a more useful way to understand it. If you want to play with paint, do it. If you want to help mankind understand nature then become a physicist that understands mathematics. Jackson Pollock was a simpleton who had to paint hundreds of paintings to find one that didn't look like something he used to wipe his butt. Paint pictures with your butt, that would be an interesting experiment but it wouldn't be abstract, it would be playful human behavior. Rembrandt was abstract, fooling people into believing they were seeing a 3d scene on a 2d canvas. A little more science and nature and a little less BS would help the credibility of art.
Blayde Keel “The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I feel it's not beautiful? And very shortly you discover there is no reason.”
I think I sometimes bark too loud about the artistic use of the word "abstract." I am not a fan of Pollock but so what? People know that it takes years of interest, devotion, and practice to play the piano well but often think visual artists are just born into it and that creativity is simply messing around with paint. I suspect that in both art and music first comes interest, then comes years of what some call practice, the problem is that in reality the practice for the most gifted artists is years of playful inter-action with the medium. Pollock may have some of that but I prefer Gerhard Richter because his investigations into abstraction are erudite and playful. As for beauty the scene in the Tin Drum comes to mind, where the guy pulls the horse head out of the water and starts dumping eels out of it. The lady is puking, a guy is helping to put the eels in a sack and the kid is observing the whole thing. Is that beauty? I don't know but it is a great piece of art.
OK, first of all, Rembrandt was not an abstract painter. Recreating reality on a two-dimensional surface is not the definition of abstraction. I think you have to start at the beginning of this series and watch again, listening very carefully with an open mind. Also, look at different kinds of abstract art and expose yourself to it's myriad forms. There are videos and books (most notably the Pulitzer prize winning biography by Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh from 1989) that explain in much more detail what Pollock was doing and why. Collings briefly explains the architecture of the no.32 piece but it's usually difficult to jump right into appreciating Pollock with little or no background in understanding why it's such important art. It's OK to not like Pollock, but I feel you need to come by that conclusion from a place of knowledge. not ignorance, such as saying his work looks like "something he used to wipe his butt." You're probably too intelligent to actually believe that statement. Also, some more hard-core art history might help you. There IS a science to abstract painting, including colour relations and how the mediums interact on a chemical level, plus the science of how the human eye perceives and understands the art. Plus, you don't need to "become a physicist" to understand nature. That's just a silly statement and reveals that you couldn't possibly truly appreciate art, or nature itself for that matter. (Your teaching art scares me a little, sorry) Think of the Impressionists and Turner! They sought to understand an interpret nature in their own way and changed art history forever, without a textbook in sight. In fact, some of Turner's work is just as abstract as some art being done today. Surely you like Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh. Contemporary abstract art is just an extension of what these artists achieved. The principles are the same.
Julia Hrivnak Fine here is the abstract genius; Gerhard Richter, his "abstract" stuff blew me away. Pollock is way over rated and andy Warhol is under rated, Richter was off the scale until he got so famous. Another example cubism. The greatest cubist painting isn't even recognized as cubism; Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendant un escalier. Here is a great abstraction from Duchamp the urinal, I like it because that object is a piece of art and I like the fact that Duchamp was taking a bit of a jab at snobs in the art world. I shouldn't have said that Pollocks work looked like something he wiped his butt with. I get frustrated because I teach Middle School art where the kids what me to show them the magic tricks, the illusion of art. They want to know how to use the materials to create art, some people in the art teaching profession want them to run before they can crawl. This idea of abstraction in art is often too pedestrian for me. Here is an example of a little side thing I did for the students. When they discovered planet nine, I couldn't make sense of where it was at so I started looking at the scale of the solar system. It was shown in exponential form, which makes no sense visually. I got a meter stick and made one AU equal to 1 millimeter that placed saturn at about 1 centimeter and the edge of the heliopause at about 10 centimeters (the farthest craft we ever sent out into space just left the heliopause). Planet nine at its perihelion is about 20 centimeters and I forget its aphelion but it is over 50 centimeters, long story short the Oort cloud starts near the other end of the meter stick and extends to the edge of the suns gravitational influence about a half block away and the nearest star to our sun is about a block away, in the parking lot. See this a visual abstraction that helps students see and in a sense it became a piece of performance art because I had so much fun acting it out. Its it art or science, I have a hard time with the distinction, weren't radio tubes beautiful Dada? Often I find that I like the artist but not the fans because they make way to much of the product with out understanding the beauty of the process. Sorry about the stupid comment about Pollock, I am sure that I would have liked to listen to him talk.
Julia Hrivnak what a fitting reply. Thank for for your insight