Abstract art has been around for about a hundred years, long enough, you would think, for it to have ceased to be an issue. Yet despite its century-old tradition, abstraction still causes consternation. Unsophisticated audiences continue to be disconcerted by the way that abstract paintings and sculptures look like nothing but themselves. What’s more surprising, some of the hippest gallery- and museum-goers are often just as disconcerted, albeit for different reasons. Abstraction’s resistance to explication disturbs many sophisticated viewers, given the present-day art world’s cherished conviction that works of art must be fully bolstered by statements of intent and elaborate iterations of generating concepts, if they are to be taken seriously. Works that at first viewing apparently refuse to be about anything but themselves and their own history are dismissed as empty, corporate, “merely” decorative, or, in some circles, patriarchal and imperialist, no matter how multivalent the associations they provoke. (Abstract artists who claim deep spiritual, theoretical, or philosophical bases for their work are usually exempt from these charges.) Adding to abstract art’s ability to discomfit is the lingering resentment provoked by the name “Clement Greenberg,” the most articulate and perceptive champion of American post-war abstraction.

Abstract art has been around for about a hundred years, long enough, you would think, for it to have ceased to be an issue.

The more recent the abstract art, the more problematic it seems to be. No one doubts the importance of Vassily Kandinsky or Piet Mondrian. Russian Constructivism