For perfectly good reasons, many artists prefer not to describe their work in terms of ‘artistic development’. They would explain that their practice is informed by conditions, or circumstances, or interests external to the realm of art, and that their work was always a response to a situation, or a certain agenda …or whatever. Arranging all their artworks chronologically – one after the other – would undoubtedly demonstrate ‘development’, but any signs of progression would probably tell you only of the shifting interests and commitments of the artist. As for the work itself, this might well display no formal or stylistic continuity at all. Hans Haacke would be a good example of this particular approach.
It is much more meaningful to speak of ‘artistic development’ when you are discussing a painter such as Piet Mondrian. Most scholars of his work stress that even though he reduces his painterly vocabulary to just the primaries, and although he insists on working simply with horizontal and vertical lines, it is still possible to speak of him refining and developing his work. Each canvas could be said to be an assimilation of lessons gleaned from a previous work, so that his art in its entirety demonstrates the overall advancement of his approach.
Barnett Newman occupies an interesting position in any discussion relating to artistic development. Every student of Abstract Expressionism knows the artist’s ‘conversion’ story as recounted by Tom Hess:
On his birthday, January 29, 1948, [Newman] prepared a small canvas with a surface of cadmium red dark, … and fixed a piece of tape down the center. Then he quickly smeared a coat of cadmium red light over the tape, to test the color. He looked at the picture for a long time. Indeed he studied it for some eight months. He had finished questing.
Barnett Newman, Onement, I (1948)
oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas, 69.2 x 41.2 cm
He had found an essential form (we are let to believe) that he reiterated for the rest of his life: it consisted of a colour field, intersected by a ‘zip’. Newman’s ‘zip’ paintings are impressively diverse. However, in contrast to Mondrian, art historians have been very hesitant in claiming that they can identify ‘artistic development’ in his mature work. Instead, they have felt that the differences between the canvases do not relate to any synthesis of previous works, nor do they evidence any radical re-appraisal on his part of his initial ‘conversion’. In other words, the differences between canvases provides no substantial indication that he is encountering and solving artistic problems based on his previous experiences as a painter.
Art historians justify their reticence in speaking of serial development in relation to Newman by appealing to the artist’s own intentions. Newman was insistent that he commenced each work as though he had never before picked up a paint brush. For him, each fresh blank canvas had to be approached as if he were painting for the very first time. He never wanted to be understood as someone who merely illustrated a preconceived idea, or just worked up some pre-existing design.
His adamance is easily queried. All the same it would be a misrepresentation of Newman to suggest that simply because his work displayed little evidence of serial development he was repeating one single practice over the course of a lifetime. In his mind, he was reinventing himself with every painting he completed.
Unlike Newman, the artists associated with this project are clear what their next work will be like. It continues a trajectory they have already established. Their art does not demonstrate ‘artistic development’. It consists of variables within a set of preordained parameters.