Abstraction, Artisanal Knowledge and Craft Epistemologies

This session reexamines abstraction as a site of intersections and dissonances between modes of making, focused especially on those between the fine arts and so-called craft or artisanal practices. In particular, we aim to interrogate how and why abstraction functions as a vehicle for expanding notions of artistic making to include previously excluded techniques, media, skills, perspectives, and associated forms of embodied knowledge. As such, this panel includes papers that critically rethink abstraction as part of a broad, inclusive and intersectional history of modern and contemporary art.

Challenging Euro-American formalist narratives, recent studies by Sarah Louise Cowan, Philip J. Deloria, and Julia Bryan-Wilson—among others—have introduced new models for analysing abstraction within African diasporic, Native American, and feminist histories of making. Meanwhile, exhibitions such as Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction have foregrounded the long relationship between modernist art and textiles. Building on these discussions, this session puts emphasis on the manual expertise and craft intelligence involved in such exchanges. How have artists channelled forms of embodied knowledge and specific epistemologies of craft in their engagements with abstract art? What opportunities has abstraction offered for elevating marginalised practices and surfacing lesser-known histories?

Session Convenors:

Max Boersma, Freie Universität Berlin

Cora Chalaby, University College London

Speakers:

Imogen Hart, Oxford Brookes University

Barron & Larcher’s Abstraction

This paper analyses the work of British artists Phyllis Barron (1890–1964) and Dorothy Larcher (1884–1952). It focuses on the block-printed textiles Barron and Larcher designed and made together in the 1920s and 1930s. First, examining key examples in detail, the paper demonstrates how Barron and Larcher developed abstract pattern through their experimentation with block carving, dyeing, and overprinting, sometimes on both sides of the fabric. Looking closely at the complex layering of prints and the places where one repeat meets another, the paper considers how Barron and Larcher’s patterns explore depth and flatness, repetition and variation, and the form of the grid. Secondly, the paper identifies abstraction as a key theme in interwar exhibitions of Barron and Larcher’s work. Their involvement in craft organizations brought their work into conversation with a community of abstract artists working between fine and decorative art in a variety of media. They used abstract pattern to embrace the functional characteristics of objects and evoke the bodies and rituals of domestic space. Building on these observations, the paper concludes by exploring the collaborative dimensions of Barron and Larcher’s abstraction in both the workshop and the exhibition. Through their creative partnership, their teamwork with assistants and pupils, and their contributions to group displays, they kept their craft practice flexible and experimental. Barron and Larcher’s abstract textiles both refer back to embodied and collaborative processes of making and point beyond themselves to the spaces around them and the communities they serve.

Daisy Silver, The Courtauld Institute of Art

The Modernist Basket

While baskets have appeared in revisionist modernist exhibitions on textiles, it is only recently that they have been studied independently. This problem was first addressed by artist and historian Ed Rossbach in 1960s California, who set to distinguish basketry within contemporary explorations of textiles and abstraction. Rossbach’s own baskets and those of the movement he named, New Basketry, experimented with questions of structure, form, and fibrousness.

Though similar to textile weaving, basketry occupies an ontologically distinct space. Basket weaving employs distinct techniques such as coiling, plaiting and twining to create three-dimensional forms, setting it apart from the warp-and-weft structure of loom weaving. This difference shapes basketry’s relationship to abstraction, with curved, continuous surfaces instead of flat, two-dimensional constructions. As I will argue, these differences allowed the modernist basket to occupy a unique place in formal abstract considerations. In doing so, this paper will disrupt and expand previous narratives which have excluded this chapter of modernism.

This will be achieved through close examination of works by New Basketry artists, including Rossbach and Katherine Westphal, alongside broader explorations in basketry by Ruth Asawa, Anni Albers, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Many modernist baskets drew from ancient and Indigenous techniques, introducing new materials such as plastic, foil, and wire. As such, this paper interrogates each artist’s relationship to these communities and knowledge systems and their appropriation within modernist discourse. In doing so, this paper offers the first effort to trace shared formal considerations across these modernist baskets and their connection to broader questions of abstraction.

Cora Chalaby, University College London

‘Giving Up One’s Mark’: Printmaking into Painting

This paper interrogates the technical, formal and conceptual impact of printmaking on late modernist abstract painting. Specifically, I investigate work made during the American Print Renaissance of the 1960s to 1980s. The American Print Renaissance has been celebrated as moment of radical departure within lesser-known histories of printmaking: during this period artisans and artists transformed the limits of the medium. Reflecting printmaking’s marginalisation due to associations with craft, outdated technicality and commercial reproduction, the wider impact of the American Print Renaissance has been overlooked. I argue that the new possibilities prised open for abstract printmaking between the 1960s and 1980s formed a vehicle for reimagining the boundaries of painting.

Helen Frankenthaler’s practice forms a rich case study for this paper. While Frankenthaler is primarily known for her monumental abstract paintings and invention of the soak-stain technique, printmaking formed a vital part of her oeuvre. Countering ingrained and gendered material hierarchies, I consider how a printerly sensibility entered into Frankenthaler’s paintings. Attending to Frankenthaler’s collaborations with printmaking workshops, I consider how and why forms of craft intelligence developed within these spaces more broadly impacted Frankenthaler’s process and approach to abstraction. Emphasis will be placed on Frankenthaler’s shifting technique, such as her act of ‘giving up one’s mark’ in her paintings of the late 1960s which I connect to a deepening engagement with printmaking. Printmaking offers an alternate vantage point through which to reconceptualize where and how Frankenthaler extended abstract painting as an aesthetic category, subject and site of production.

Star Song, Bryn Mawr College

Chang Dai-chien’s Method of Adapting Abstraction to Tradition: A Case Study on Chang Dai-chien’s Cloudy Mountains in the Style of Splashed Ink 潑墨雲山圖

Chang Dai-Chien 張大千 (1899-1983), one of the most important Chinese painters of the 20th century, mainly gained his reputation from his innovative splashed ink-and-color style. This style is closely intertwined with diverse sources, including Chinese traditional landscapes, European Expressionism, and foremost, American Abstract Expressionism. However, the majority of previous scholars focused on how Chang insisted on his Chinese traditions, neglecting the long-lasting Western influences in Chang’s late works. This paper will conduct a careful analysis of a handscroll painting, Cloudy Mountains in the Style of Splashed Ink 潑墨雲山圖, to reveal the fact that “abstraction” provided Chang with a new methodology to improvise unexpected compositions. This paper will start by revealing three canonical Chinese painting themes embedded accordingly in this handscroll. The succeeding section will introduce Chang’s step-by-step process of composing a splashed ink-and-color painting. The inevitable randomness associated with the painting process was always his starting point. Conforming to this nature, Chang arranged his “conventionalizing” visual forms to respond to the “abstracting” splashed ink/color. In other words, Chang’s choice of those three themes was not a preset, but a result of similarity detection posterior to the unpredictable splashed ink and color. In the final section, a revised analysis of Chang’s splashed ink-and-color style will be presented: The concept of abstraction freed Chang to experiment with new compositions, and subsequently, these new compositions were transformed back to match traditional schemata, resonating with Chang’s identity and embodied knowledge.

Smaranda Ciubotaru, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Material Girls: Artisanal Knowledge as Dissidence Among the Female Fiber Artists of the Ceaușescu Epoch

The systematic dissemination of nationalist socialist propaganda during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime (1965-1989) called for a heightened integration of traditional craftwork and folklore within the oeuvres of Romanian artists. This paper analyses the abstract work of female fiber artists like Ariana Nicodim, Daniela Grușevschi, and Lena Constante, arguing for their use of artisanal knowledge and vernacular textile techniques as a concealed form of dissidence. Female artists called upon the local specificity of traditional textiles as a way of countering the imposed uniformity of the traditional craftwork generated for national festivals such as The Song of Romania (Cîntarea României) or within state-regulated craft cooperatives (UCECOM). Turning to materiality and endemic fiber processing methods (Nicodim and Grușevschi) or ethnographic artefacts (Lena Constante) as sources of abstraction, such artists reiterated the significance of localised narratives over the monolithic nationalism propagated through Ceaușescu era historiographies. Within Romania, women traditionally bore a central role in textile production. They ensured the transmission of both artisanal knowledge as well as familial histories through the trans-generational process of dowry creation. Dowries were predominantly made up of objects such as woven wall-carpets, towels, and blouses, some of which had been passed down from predecessors, whilst others were made anew to display the skill of the inheritor. This paper examines how Romanian fiber artists ensured the transmission of such practices by repositioning them within the realm of abstraction.