Avrumi Mashinsky: History of Abstract Painting

“In the history of art, one cannot ignore the appearance of photography, which will have direct consequences on the development of painting,” says abstract painter Avrumi Mashinsky. As early as 1839, it appeared indeed as a competing technique of painting: painters felt directly concerned when they discovered that they were no longer needed to describe, represent, illustrate functions that were too easily confused with the purpose of their practice. But at the same time, Avrumi Mashinsky claims that the idea of the museum began to sensitize the public to another approach to creation, where what is represented matters less than how it is represented. Art continues to be oriented by the desire to translate the visible, but painters highlight the different components of painting: line, composition, color, material, which they question the possibilities by giving an ever more place great in the way of painting. At the same time, Avrumi Mashinsky indicates that advances in science show the world in a very different way, under the gaze of figures like Bergson, Freud, Plank or Einstein. The painting becomes an object before being a representation. The creative process becomes part of the work. According to Avrumi Mashinsky, who has a Bachelor of Arts with a minor in History of Arts from the Rutgers University, the precursors of abstract painting are Seurat - his paintings are in fact only series of colored dots - and, above all, Monet, who will push his studies on Water Lilies to the point of virtual dissolution of forms, which he converts into colors - moreover, he would not really be understood until after 1945. But his experience had direct consequences for Kandinsky, since it was in front of one of Monet's "Haystacks" that he decided to become a painter. As Avrumi Mashinsky further shares, Gauguin compared painting to music. "I obtain by arrangements of lines and colors, with the pretext of any subject, harmonies representing nothing absolutely real, not expressing any idea directly, but having to make people think, as music makes people think and awakens images. He concludes by recalling that "a painting, before being a workhorse, a naked woman or any anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order. " Avrumi Mashinsky points out that Braque and Picasso, starting from Cézanne's ideas revitalized by contact with Negro art, affirm, in cubism, the primacy of the construction of the painting. Their art, however, remains figurative. But the subject is no longer just a pretext: the painting finds its raison d'etre in itself (this was already the case in Monet's "series"). According to the abstract painter, Avrumi Mashinsky, the first abstract painters will highlight the characteristic elements of a new sensibility: color, rhythm and matter. Thus with Duchamp trying to represent the fourth dimension: time (Man descending a staircase) - or with Malévitch (The grinder). And then, with the advent of all-powerful science, "machines" invaded paintings (Léger, Duchamp, Picabia). Moreover, for Duchamp, painting should no longer only "be visual or retinal but also concern gray matter"