Preface
This publication is devoted to a reexamination of modem art from the point of view of the artist's approach to the object. The first essay chronicles the complex, changing relationship between art and the object over the past hundred years; it is a relationship which, like nature - or art itself for that matter - has no precise beginnings or endings, only a constantly shifting emphasis, advancing and receding, like the waves of the sea, always the same but never alike. This kind of fundamental organicism has determined the total structure of the book, as one thing grows out of another, holding its past and its future within itself. Cézanne's obsessive, full stressing of both nature and art throws a bridge from the faithful representation of the object in nineteenth-century painting to cubist and subsequent abstraction's freedom from the object. Picasso's indebtedness to Cézanne in his subjugation of the object is indisputable. However, it is not only formally that Picasso considered himself Cézanne's son, but also in the autobiographical expressiveness which asserts itself even in his most rigorously analytic cubist phase. He made that clear when he said that Cézanne wouldn't have interested him at all if he had not been the suffering human being that he was. In the mid-twentieth century, Jackson Pollock is akin to both earlier masters as he passionately identifies himself with his work; 'I am nature' also means 'I am the form I create'. Certainly Cézanne's as well as Pollock's painting is, like most art, to some extent about art; but such artists as Lichtenstein, Johns and Dine stress that aspect of their work more obviously. One might even propose, not altogether frivolously, that Cézanne's insistence on the importance of the painter's mind anticipates conceptual art. These instances of interrelationship, of a giving and taking kinship, and of a flexible continuity have been cited to exemplify the kind of organic order into which the contents of the book have been disposed.

1 Modern Art and the Object from Nineteenth-century Nature Painting to Conceptual Art
Art criticism, like politics, is plagued by words which mean different things to different people in different places at different times. When the contemporary American artist Mel Bochner says, 'In the early 'sixties the formula was "art= object",' the word 'object' is different in meaning and reference from what it was for Picasso, for whom it meant the source object in the visual world which served as the point of departure for art's inventions. He told Zervos, 'There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There's no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark.' 1 Picasso meant by 'object' more what Kandinsky had in mind when he called his abstract painting 'non-objective', whereas Bochner was referring to the paintings and constructions of such artists as Frank Stella, Robert Morris and Sol Lewitt as objects. The whole problem is more a question of what is the object, than of what an object is; or one might say it is more a question of where than of what. Is it something 'out there' in the external world (a river, a mountain, a haystack); or is it something 'in here' (either the artist's personal vision and his emotional reaction to the external world, or the work of art turned in on itself, focusing on its own properties and processes); or is it something having no visible substance and/or no direct cause-effect relationship to physical reality (a philosophic proposition or similar idea) ?

Thus, in considering modem art from naturalism to conceptualism, we speak first of the object as that part of the external world which served as the departure point, the subject matter, for the work of art. Then gradually we switch, with the artist, to thinking about the object as the work of art itself, a tangible thing among things, which 'lives its own life', to use Picasso's well-worn phrase. Perhaps less familiar is a statement he made to Françoise Gilot: 'One of the fundamental points about cubism is this: not only did we try to displace reality; reality was no longer in the object. Reality was in the painting.' 2 Finally, we encounter the widely held contemporary stance that the art object has sunk to the level of a commodity and it is to be spurned by artists. So, the object is dead; but long live the object! Because of course these artists stake out new territory and their new object (meaning either subject-matter or work of art or a combination of both) may be anything from a mathematical theorem to the life cycle of an ant. Throughout all the enormously varied ramifications of the basic usages of 'object', there runs, moreover, a hint of its signifying 'purpose'. A further variant on the use of the word is hardly relevant to the present study, but should at least be mentioned: the object as a matter-of-fact thing, i.e. as the result of an 'objective' as opposed to a 'subjective' approach. This is what Claes Oldenburg meant when he said that in his happenings he treated the actors and the audience as objects, or what Rainer Crone had in mind when he wrote that in Andy Warhol's Jackie Kennedy portraits 'the emotions of mourning become object'. 3

The entire gamut of modem art can be viewed from the vantage point of the artist's attitude towards the object, an examination which should throw some light on the larger problem of how the modern artist chooses to interweave art and reality and, ultimately, of what constitutes reality for him. In this first chapter, the broad outlines of such an investigation are sketched in; and in the essays which follow, some particular areas of the problematic relationship between art and object are explored in greater detail.

It hardly needs saying that no movement or individual is concerned exclusively with any one phase of that relationship; rather, it is a matter of degree and emphasis. At the risk of falsifying through over-simplification in pursuit of clarity, I shall trace major strains of emphasis as they wind in and out of art history from Cézanne and John F. Kensett in the second half of the nineteenth century to Chuck Close and Mel Bochner in the second half of the twentieth century...