Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction and Abstract Art-Glen McLeod PDF

'Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction' and Abstract Art
Author(s): Glen McLeod

Source: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Summer, 1989), pp. 31-48
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831372
Accessed: 05-07-2017 01:32 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal
of Modern Literature
This content downloaded from 128.122.149.81 on Wed, 05 Jul 2017 01:32:51 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
GLEN MCLEOD
UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT
"'Notes Towards a Supreme

Fiction' and Abstract Art"*
Critics have argued over the years about what exactly Wallace Steven
meant when he affixed the subtitle "It Must Be Abstract" to the first
section of his poetic manifesto "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction."1 Yet
one fascinating aspect of this important milestone in Stevens's career still
remains to be explored. It is a curious fact of American cultural history
that in the early 1940s, when Stevens wrote "Notes toward a Supreme
Fiction," abstract painting was rapidly emerging as the dominant strain
in American art. After years of neglect, while Regionalism and Social
Realism held the stage during the 1930s, American abstraction took the
lead in the 1940s and "triumphed" after World War II in the movement
known as Abstract Expressionism.2 It is not merely coincidence that
Stevens?who had a strong, lifelong interest in the visual arts?chose
the term "abstract" to describe his own poetic aims at this particular
historical moment. His word demonstrates the potentially significant
relationship between these parallel developments in American painting
and poetry.
Stevens's choice of the word "abstract" in 1942 could not have been
made casually. In 1935, he had asserted that "my real danger
* The completion of this essay was made possible by a J. Paul Getty Fellowship in the History of Art and
the Humanities.
1 All quotations from "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" (hereafter cited as "Notes") and other poems are,
unless otherwise noted, taken from the text of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Knopf, 1954).
The various points of view of Stevens's critics have recently been analyzed?lucidly and in some detail?by
B.J. Leggett in Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction (University of North Carolina
Press, 1987), pp. 17-41.
2 See Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (Harper and
Row, 1970).
31
Glen McLeod, "'Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction' and Abstract Art" Journal of Modern Literature, XVI.1
(Summer 1989), pp. 31-48. ? 1990 Temple University.
32 GLEN MCLEOD
is . . . abstraction
particulars that h
defined Imagism,
the New Criticism
That Stevens asso
both as dangerou
he carefully disc
"The Man with the Blue Guitar":
Actually, they are not abstractions, even though what I have just said about
them suggests that. Perhaps it would be better to say that what they really
deal with is the painter's problem of realization. . . . (Letters, 316)
Both of these instances show Stevens anxiously avoiding the word

"abstraction," at least as it applies to his own verse. The chief fault that
he initially found with abstraction is epitomized by a note about Picasso
that he copied into his commonplace book in 1938: "[H]e is an over-in-
tellectual designer who moves one to thought, but not to feeling."5 His
own poem "The Common Life" (1938) illustrates this point, using the
abstract artist's radical reduction of form to straight lines and flat planes
as a figure for an overly intellectual approach to life and art:
That's the down-town frieze,

Principally the church steeple,
A black line beside a white line;
And the stack of the electric plant,
A black line drawn on flat air.
. . . In this light a man is a result,

A demonstration, and a woman,
Without rose and without violet,
The shadows that are absent from Euclid,
Is not a woman for a man.
3 Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Knopf, 1966), p. 302. Hereafter cited
within the text as Letters.
4 Stevens' use of the term "abstraction" in so positive a sense in 1942 naturally brought him under attack by
writers sympathetic to New Critical standards. The best example is that of Randall Jarrell. See "Reflections on
Wallace Stevens," in Poetry and the Age (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1953, 1972), because he is a critic
otherwise sympathetic to Stevens.
5 Copied from "A note in Apollo for November, 1938, p. 266 on Picasso's 'Guernica,' exhibited at the New
Burlington Galleries in London," in Stevens' notebooks Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects in the Huntingon Library. I
am grateful to Milton J. Bates for providing me with a typewritten manuscript of these notebooks while he was
editing them for publication. This book has since been published as Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace
Stevens' Commonplace Book. A Facsimile and Transcription, by Stanford University Press/Huntington Library,
1989. The quotation referred to above is on p. 63.
Stevens echoed this judgment in a letter a few years later: "[A] man who depends on his intelligence like
Picasso ... can never be anything else but intelligent" (Letters, p. 478).
NOTES TOWARDS A SUPREME FICTION 33
. . . The men have no shadows

And the women have only one side.6
Here we see Stevens deliberately distancing himself from abstract art,

which he associates with the strict rationalism ofthe geometric abstract
tradition.
A distinct change of attitude separates these passages of 1938, so
fundamentally critical of abstract art, from Stevens' declaration in 1942
that "It Must Be Abstract." The event that precipitated this change was
the Second World War, which, in Stevens' view, was simply a continu-
ation of the First World War. He called it in 1941 "a renewal of what,
if it was not the greatest war, became such by this continuation."7 This
slight modulation of the phrase "the Great War" to "the greatest war"
marks a profound development in Stevens's poetic career. From this
point onward he was to conceive of life in the twentieth century as "life
in a state of violence" (Angel, 26). Under the pressure of constant war
and of the "war-like whole" (Angel, 21), the chief measure of a modern
poet becomes his "imagination pressing back against the pressure of
reality" (Angel, 36). In a significant choice of terms, Stevens describes
this ability as:
. . . [the] power to abstract himself, and to withdraw with him into his
abstraction the reality on which the lovers of truth insist. He must be able
to abstract himself and also to abstract reality, which he does by placing
it in his imagination. (Angel, 23)
In the violent context of modern life, the rational faculty of abstraction

grows dramatically in value, acquiring in this passage a power second
only to that of the imagination itself.
"Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" marks a shift in Stevens' poetic
world away from an emphasis on "The Irrational Element in Poetry"
(the title of a 1936 essay) and toward a greater emphasis on rationalism.
Both elements had always been present in Stevens' poetry, of course,
but "Notes" defines a new balance that marks a turning-point in Stevens'
career. The first section of "Notes," and the strict form of that poem as
a whole, are concessions to rationalism made under the pressure of
war. The subtitle, "It Must Be Abstract," asserts in a straightforward
manner the primacy of rationalism, however much the rest of the poem
qualifies that assertion.
6 Wallace Stevens, "The Common Life," 221.
7 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Vintage, 1951), p. 20.
Hereafter cited within the text as Angel.
34 GLEN MCLEOD
That it was a stro

confirmed by Stev
originally conceive
the final version
Church:
At first I attempted t
REFACIMENTO. . . .
development, I shoul
into the thing, and th
off in any sense, not
It seems clear tha

only a numerical n
edy, but also a sy
cartes' Regulae?w
point of each can
Stevens associated
abstract art.8
That Stevens had
"Notes" is eviden
REFACIMENTO (m
the vocabulary of a
art to its original c
confirmed in anoth
Some one here wrot
meant by a thinker
generations off a pict
world without its varn
426-427)
Stevens repeats this conception in "It Must Be Abstract" when he claims

that even Adam and Eve were "The inhabitants of a very varnished
green" (l.iv.7).
8 Descartes's Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii were much in Stevens's thoughts in the 1930s. He alludes to
them in his poem of 1935, "Winter Bells" (12, p.141; see also Letters, p. 348), and they were the models for
the Captain's Regulae Mundi m his poem of 1939 "Life on a Battieship" (Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous,
revised edition, ed. Milton J. Bates (Knopf, 1989), p.107. The Captain's three "rules" in the latter poem were,
in turn, a trial run for Stevens's prescriptive subtitles in "Notes." We may not be far wrong if we think of "Notes"
as Stevens's attempt to write his own "Rules for the Direction of the Mind." The remnants of this scheme can
be seen most clearly in the first four cantos of "It Must Be Abstract," which develop the concept oi "the first
idea" with marked regularity: 1. "Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea / Of this invention . . ." (l.i.1-2); 2. "It
is the celestial ennui of apartments / That sends us back to the first idea . . ."(l.ii.1-2); 3. "The poem refreshes
I ife so that we share,/For a moment, the first idea. . . ."(l.iii.1-2);4. "The first idea was not our own" (l.iv.1).
9 Luigi Grassi and Mario Pepe, Dizionario della critica d'arte, vol. 2 (Torino; Unione Tipografico-Editrice
Torinese, 1978).
The poet is clearly not referring to an abs

ages. But the sort of painting he was think
in his mind, with abstraction. Stevens's one d
in "Notes" suggests that he had in mind t
began the poem:
. . . Weather by Franz Hals,
Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clou

Wetted by blue, colder for white. . . .(l.vi
Seventeenth-century Dutch painting may

geometric abstraction, especially the art of
("brushy") style is the very opposite of linear
Dutch painting and geometry together, as
I remember reading an essay of Dr. [Wilhelm Re
squareness in Dutch painting, which he attribut
country and its linear effect. This sounds like n
can be demonstrated that Dutch painting is bas
Italian painting is based on circles, or, at least,
squares. Dr. Valentiner has not spent his life th
without having got rid of a good deal of nonsen
Stevens is recalling the essay, "Linear Com

Valentiner's The Art of the Low Countries
basic rectangular composition pervades th
and art of Holland:
This tendency has marked the art of every period
latest?from Geertgen van Haarlem's to Lucas
mbrandt's and down to the modern work of Jon
in Italy the triangle, so in Holland the rectangle,
turn a fragment of nature into a composition com
This notion that the quality of the imagina

country, and that national traits correspon
influenced Stevens deeply. He referred to
"Imagination as Value," once again assoc
square:
The commonest idea of an imaginative object is something large. But ap?

parently with the Japanese it is the other way round and with them the
commonest idea of an imaginative object is something small. With the
Hindu it appears to be something vermicular, with the Chinese, something
round and with the Dutch, something square. (Angel, 143)
10 Wilhelm R. Valentiner, The Art of the Low Countries, trans. Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer (Doubleday,
Page&Co., 1914), pp. 6-7.
36 GLEN MCLEOD
The chief twentie

De Stijl movemen
to note that Stev
Dutch art when h
Stevens had a pa
always considered
ters, 146, 422), a
"Notes," he was a
Two other major
Dutch heritage:
opening lines inv
in Bucks County,
his Dutch forebe
rational order re
characteristic" of
rein to this impu
rather to express
order was surely h
World War II, a
of Holland.13
As Stevens was w
art" was the geom
11 This observation helps t

appears not only as the epit
too, it is surely not irrelev
who painted his best known
12 Valentiner, p. 6.
13 Germany invaded the N

Stevens may well have thou
a paradigm of artistic gre
Craven's A Treasury of Art M
p. 118?the source of Steven
Reginald Marsh's painting "W
The most independent and

school, which began with
The impetus to a self-suf
oppression: a part of her e
The final peace with Spain
that date, and all painted t
to paint in such circumsta
This book also reproduces in

a sky "Brushed up by brush
identifying Reginald Marsh
14 See H. L. C. Jaffe, De St
1956), p. 4.
the 1930s, the Wadsworth Atheneum in

foremost champions of De Stijl principles
great publicity in 1930, the Director, A. Eve
office as "a free composition in colored planes
"not only ofthe Bauhaus . . . butalsoofthe
And when its new Avery Memorial wing op
became the "museum with the most modern
which "All ornamentation and detail have
pletely."16 The Dutch contribution to mode
was stressed in the landmark exhibition Mode
by the Museum of Modern Art) that appear
One of the four founders of the "Internati
show (along with Gropius, Le Corbusier, an
the De Stijl architect J. J. P. Oud.17 A s
buildings was included in that exhibit and
years later in the Atheneum's Abstract Art
gave prominent attention to two other mem
Cesar Domela and Piet Mondrian. As a m
Stevens was necessarily well versed in Dut
So it is not surprising that, in 1942, Stev
to indulge his longing for Dutch tradition
establish his "relation to contemporary ide
ceiving "Notes" with the analogy of twent
mind. The most famous living Dutch artist
(1872-1944), who, as a wartime refugee, was
in New York City. Stevens had surely kno
from his reading of European and American
from viewing Mondrian's paintings at the
15 Helen Searing, "From the Fogg to the Bauhaus: A Museum for

Wadsworth Atheneum: The First Modern Museum, ed. Eugene R. Gadd
16 HartfordCourant, "New Avery Memorial Building," unsigned art

scrapbook, Wadsworth Atheneum (microfilm), 20.
17 The centrality of architecture in the De Stijl movement help

Viollet-le-Duc in "Notes" l.viii.2. In Alfred H. Barr, Henry Russell
Architecture: International Exhibition (Museum of Modern Art, 1
Architecture exhibit, the essay on Oud begins:
Oud was born at Purmerend in 1890. His artistic heritage leads

of medieval rationalism like Pugin in England or Viollet-le-Duc i
Viollet-le-Duc was a major figure in the nineteenth-century movemen

rational and functional rather than decorative and mystical. In his vie
had a structural purpose. This rationalist approach to design establish
the "International Style." Thus Stevens's reference to Viollet-le-Du
wistful medievalism. I wish to thank Douglas Brenner for clarifying
38 GLEN MCLEOD
Hartford and at t
he could hardly h
year Mondrian ap
York. He also had
that "established
toric exhibit open
1942, just at the
"Notes."19 Althou
show, it seems like
Mondrian was alre
and certain aspect
been particularly
"pure" artist, wh
representation fr
of January 1942
abstract enjoymen
vens, whose chie
aesthetic of 'pure
"Notes," "It Must
"Pure" and detac
also given rise to a
world. "Piet Mond
arts," proclaime
can see the impac
magazines, poster
18 Piet Mondrian, The Ne

Harry Holtzman and Martin
abstractions in its "Abstrac
Anonyme collection in 1940.
painting for its permanent
recalled in a conversation w
the things that he liked the
on Washington Square, near
in 1942 were: The American
after his arrival in New Yor
"Masters of Abstract Art" a
of Living Art; and the open
19 Stevens wrote to Henr

private press, which will cer
written a word of it." {Letter
20 Robert M. Coates, "The
21 A. Walton Litz, "Wallace

of Reality," in Romantic an
Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 11
at Childs."22 The New Yorker made even gr

influence:
I suppose there is no other painter alive today wh

lives has been as concrete and immediate as that of Piet Mondrian. The
leader of the De Styl [sic] group of purist painters in Holland, which in
turn inspired most of the new school of architectural design, he has in?
fluenced everything, from the shape of our modernist buildings down to
furniture and posters.23
Mondrian was perhaps the chief living exemplar in 1942 ofthe Shelleyan
artist who actually creates the world in which we live. His career could
be cited as proof that, in Mondrian's own words, ". . . pure art, even
though it appear abstract, can be of direct utility for life."24 This concept
of the artist was particularly important to Stevens's thinking at the time
he was writing "Notes." He states in his essay "The Noble Rider and
the Sound of Words" (1941), in a passage that obviously presages
"Notes:"
. . . what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to
be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without
knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we
are unable to conceive of it. (Angel, 31)
He might well have had Mondrian in mind when he concluded, in a

later essay, that the closest relation between poetry and painting is their
common role as "sources of our present conception of reality" (Ange
176).
Mondrian's legendary reputation as the man who virtually personified
the abstract movement may well lie behind one ofthe most memorab
images of "It Must Be Abstract." Mondrian was famous in the early
1940s for being "a spectacular devotee of solitary life," a "gentle herm
of almost seventy," living in a New York apartment that had an "almost
monastic air of strict minimums."25 It seems possible that this aspect of
Mondrian's character inspired "Notes" l.ii:
22 "The Great Flight of Culture: Twelve Artists in U. S. Exile," Fortune XXIV:6 (December 1941), 103.
23 Coates, p. 55. Stevens read The New Yorker regularly. He bought a subscription for a friend in 1938
describing it as "one weekly that I feel quite sure that you would like" {Letters, p. 332). Wilson E. Taylor, in
Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (Random House, 1983), p. 84, recalls that
Stevens planned his gallery visits to New York while reading this magazine: "He used to get those curren
exhibitsfrom The New Yorker. I don't think he ever came down that he didn't read The New Yorker on the way."
24 Piet Mondrian, "Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art: Figurative and Non-Figurative Art," in Plastic Art and
Pure Plastic Art, and Other Essays (1941-1943), ed. Robert Motherwell (Wittenborn, I945), p. 52. Hereafte
cited in the text as "Plastic Art."
25 "Lines and Rectangles," The New Yorker XVII:3 (1 March 1941), 9; "The Great Flight of Culture," 10
"Studio," The New Yorker XX:9 (15 April 1944), 21.
40 GLEN MCLEOD
It is the celestial en
That sends us back
Of this invention;
Are the ravishment

The truth itself, th
The hermit in a po
Who comes and g
The monastic man is an artist. . . .
Here the abstract "first idea" is suddenly personified as "the hermit" or

"monastic man" who inspires the poet's metaphors. (He reappears as
the "vagabond in metaphor" in II.x.) This figure might well be a poetic
record of the experience of suddenly finding Mondrian, the legendary
abstract artist, not only still alive and working in 1942, but now living
virtually next door.
Mondrian's reputation as the man who "has carried abstract art further
than anyone else"26 points to a further affinity with "Notes." For Stevens,
Mondrian's radical aesthetics were a sign of his "integrity" and of his
status as a major artist, as we can see in a letter from 1949 in which
he contrasts Jean Arp with Mondrian:
. . . [Arp] knew Mondrian. ... But he does not go along with Mondrian.
It is nonsense to speak of his integrity as an abstraction ist in the same breath
with which one speaks of Mondrian. Arp is a minor stylist, however agree-
able. But for Mondrian the abstract was the abstract. (Letters, 628)
Stevens's own tendency to think in radical terms in "Notes" is evident

in both the stylistic idiosyncracy of this poem and the aesthetic program
that it proposes. I would argue that the most characteristic trope of
"Notes" is its use of superlatives to indicate extremes of experience. A
few characteristic examples should recall the frequency and importance
of such tropes in "Notes": "The extremest book of the wisest man"
(Prologue), "the grossest iridescence of ocean" (l.iii), "the loftiest an-
tagonist," (II.ii), and "The difficultest rigor" (lll.i). I would also include
as superlatives in this sense such absolute phrases as "the final ele-
gance" (l.x), "his zero green" (II.v), and of course "the first idea" (pass-
im). Stevens had used such superlatives occasional ly even in Har-
monium, and with increasing frequency in the 1930s, but never so
insistently and systematically as in "Notes." Here they are not simply
stylistic elements but the most direct expression of the poem's leading
"Lines and Rectangles," 9.
point: like the concept of the "first idea,

the need to confront psychological ly th
case" in order to establish the validity of a
Stevens considered this way of thinking
closely associated in his mind with the k
Mondrian stood.
Thinking in terms of an extreme "test case" is one standard method
of reasoning in moral philosophy. It is fundamental, in particular, to
Existential ism, whose focus on the extremes of experience is one modern
answer to the desire for a lost absolute. Similarly, for Wallace Stevens
the final test of value, in the absence of a God, was "EXTRAORDINARY
ACTUALITY" (Letters, 411), and his commonest example was the ex?
traordinary actuality of war. He summarized this concept at about the
time he was writing "Notes": "In the presence of the violent reality of
war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination."27 It is at such
times of existential insight, when the poet conceives the "first idea"
without any coloring of imagination, or when the soldier acts in full
awareness of the imminent possiblity of death, that man is best able to
judge true value in both art and life. Hence the close relationship
between poet and soldier in the "Epilogue" to "Notes." Both fulfill their
roles best in an atmosphere of war because it enforces the virtues of
intensity and concentration: "The role of the writer in war remains the
fundamental role of the writer intensified and concentrated."28 It was
just this sort of mind-clearing perception of concrete reality that Mond?
rian hoped to bring about through his own minimalist art.
Critics have been puzzled by Stevens's use of the word "abstract" to
denote such a process. B.J. Leggett summarizes the controversy sur-
rounding this issue:
For those readers who have placed Stevens's poetry on the reality side of
the imagination-reality conflict, the title of the opening section of Notes
and Stevens's other references to the necessity of abstraction present an
obstacle that can be surmounted only through a revision of the conception
itself. Curiously, the definitions resulting from this revision posit a meaning
that is closer to concrete or real than to any accepted usage.29
Among such critics Leggett includes Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Louis
Martz, Frank Kermode, and Roy Harvey Pearce. My point here is not
27 Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (Knopf, 1971), p. 206.
28 Wallace Stevens, "The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions," Partisan Review Vl:4 (Summer
1939), 40; rpt. in Opus Posthumous, ed. Bates, p. 310.
29 Leggett, p. 20.
42 GLEN MCLEOD
that these reader

assigns to the wo
so peculiar. Its od
which the use of
usage. As Alfred
. . . an "abstract" pai
it confines the atte
more than does the
So Theo Van Does

1930 was called A
"Some prefer the
because of its det
Naturalistic Art."3
be seen in the tit
of Reality" and "
this commonplace
was a simple mat
Be Abstract."
In weighing the significance of such parallels between Stevens and

Mondrian, we should not lose sight of the real differences that separate
these two artists. It would be impossible, I think, to draw a convincing
comparison between a Stevens poem and a classic Mondrian canvas.
The rhetorical and metaphorical opulence of Stevens's poetry has no
counterpart in the Dutch painter's starkly minimal style. Even Stevens's
barest lyrics rely on traditional poetic figures in a way that Mondrian's
non-representational paintings strictly avoid. And Stevens's formal con-
servatism (his use of conventional metrics, his lack of interest in formal
experimentation) has little to do with the utterly radical form of Mond?
rian's abstractions. How two artists, startingfrom similar premises about
the nature of art, could arrive at such different forms of expression is a
very different problem. Yet it is precisely these obvious differences in
form and style that have kept us from seeing their more fundamental
similarities in the realm of art theory.
To realize that Stevens would have known Mondrian's legendary
reputation in the art world of 1942 contributes something to our under?
standing of "It Must Be Abstract." But there may also be a deeper and
more direct connection between Mondrian's aesthetic theory and Ste-
30 Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (Museum of Modern Art, 1936), p. 11.
31 "Abstract Art," in The New Art?The New Life, 331.
vens's achievement in "Notes" as a whole. Charles Altieri has called

attention to certain parallels between "Notes" and Mondrian's essay
"Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art," published in Circle in 1937. This is
the only essay of Mondrian's that was available in English prior to 1942
and it seems likely that Stevens read it.32
Certain general similarities between "Notes" and "Plastic Art and Pure
Plastic Art" are evident from the very beginning of Mondrian's essay:
Although art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same,
nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed to each
other, appear in its many and varied expressions. One aims at the direct
creation ofuniversal beauty the other at the aesthetic expression ofoneself,
in other words, of that which one thinks and experiences. The first aims
at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively. . . . [B]oth the
two opposing elements (universal-individual) are indispensable if the work
is to arouse emotion. (Plastic Art, 50)
Mondrian's didactic tone and aphoristic phrasing bear some resem-

blance to the opening of "Notes," which is conceived as a lecture to
an "ephebe" and which tends to epigrammatic formulations such as,
"The first idea was not our own." (I.iv) But what is most striking, having
read no further than this first paragraph, is that Mondrian's theory of
abstract art is obviously neither purely formalist nor purely rationalist
32 Mondrian's published works are listed in The New Art?The New Life, pp. 398-399. There is no indication
that Stevens ever read such historically important periodicals as De Stijl, CercleetCarte, and Abstraction-Creation,
in which some of Mondrian's essays appeared. Mondrian's two pieces in Cahiers d'Art (1931, 1935), which
Stevens may have read, do not suggest parallels to his poetry. Although Mondrian delivered one major public
lecture and published three essays in English in 1942, Stevens probably did not know these works when he
wrote "Notes." Two of the essays appeared after Stevens had written most or all of "Notes": "Abstract Art" was
written in 1941 but not published till late 1942 in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century, pp. 32-33 (rpt. in
Plastic Art, pp. 27-29; see The New Art?The New Life, p. 331); and "Pure Plastic Art" appeared in the catalogue
of the exhibition "Masters of Abstract Art," held at the New Art Center in New York from 1 April to 15 May
1942 (reprinted in Plastic Art, pp. 30-36; see The New Art?The New Life, p.342). The autobiographical essay
"Toward a True Vision of Reality" was published as a pamphlet in conjunction with Mondrian's one-man show
at the Valentine Gallery in January and February, 1942; there is no evidence that Stevens attended this exhibit
or knew of the pamphlet (reprinted in Plastic Art, pp. 9-15; see The New Art?The New Life, p. 308). "A New
Realism" was delivered on Mondrian's behalf as a lecture before the AAA on January 23, 1942; but this lecture
was not reported in the press, so far as I can tell, and the essay was not published until 1945 (Plastic Art, pp.
16-26; see The New Art, pp. 345).
It seems probable, however, that Stevens was familiar with "Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art" in the book
Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art, edited by the English abstract group of J. L. Martin, Ben
Nicholson, and Naum Gabo (London: Faber and Faber, 1937). George L. K. Morris reviewed this book in
"Modernism in England," Partisan Review IV:1 (December 1937), 70, singling out Mondrian's essay as "the
most lucid key to a painter's intentions that this reviewer has encountered." Stevens saved this issue because
his poem "The Dwarf" appeared in it. The publicity about Mondrian in the winter of 1941-1942 may have
reminded Stevens about Circle and inspired him to seek out this "lucid key" to Mondrian's aesthetic theory just
as he was about to develop his own theory in "Notes." Charles Altieri, in "Why Stevens Must Be Abstract, or
What a Poet Can Learn from Painting," in Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, ed. Albert Gelpi
(Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 90-91, points out several general parallels between this essay and
"Notes" but does not elaborate and misleadingly equates Mondrian's views with those of Stevens' painter friend
Walter Pach. I am grateful to Nancy J. Troy for helping me to determine what Stevens could have known of
Mondrian's theory in early 1942.
44 GLEN MCLEOD
(like Stevens's ge
contrary, he state
self-expression a
view of art summ
the rest of Mond
precepts for the
in both cases: art
universal or obje
subjective ("It Mu
Must Give Pleasur
As Mondrian elab
"Notes" multiply.
to nature from h
fundamental relati
In removing compl
separated from the
opposition with the
opposites. . . . Preci
figurative art does n
(Plastic Art, 60)
The same dualistic

that poetry expre
violence without. I
of reality" (Angel,
to the pressure of
the proper balanc
Mondrian insists
perceives in life an
or "discovered" bu
For there are "mad
all time. These are m
and do not change.
at first incomprehen
that are inherent in
In the same way,

Perhaps there are
As when the cock c

Is well, incalculab
At which a kind of
. . . not balances
That we achieve but balances that happen, . . .
(I.vii)
Stevens's seemingly paradoxical demand

artistic equivalent of these "times of inhere
"be abstract" but also "change" correspon
of an art that must have "universal" signific
First and foremost there is the fundamental la
which is opposed to the static equilibrium nec
form (Plastic Art, 54).
The important task then of all art is to destro
establish ing a dynamic one. (Plastic Art, 57)
To achieve "dynamic equilibrium" involv

Non-figurative art demands an attempt of wh
task, the destruction of particular form and the
mutual relations. . . . It is ofthe greatest importa
constructive quality of dynamic equilibrium. (P
Stevens outlines a similar two-part cre

Abstract": first the poet must destroy all p
get back to the "first idea"; then he must c
that will satisfy the requirements of his su
of "Notes" concerns itself primarily with t
process.)
For Mondrian, the artist must adopt th
naturalized nature, of civilization" becau
ability to grasp unaided the abstract mean
not yet developed the ability to understa
In past times when one lived in contact with na
was more natural than he is today, abstraction f
was easy; it was done unconsciously. But in our
period, such abstraction becomes an effort. (Pl
Stevens analyzes exactly this problem in

point from Mondrian's demand that "the
must be realized (Plastic Art, 52):
Not to be realized because not to
Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because
Not to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals,
Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,

Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not to
Be spoken to, . . . (l.vi)
This poem describes the poet's struggle to "realize" the fictive abstraction
in exactly Mondrian's visual sense. As Stevens explains in a letter:
The poem is a struggle with the inaccessiblity of the abstract. First I make
the effort; then I turn to the weather because that is not inaccessible and
46 GLEN MCLEOD
is not abstract. . . .
real, to and fro. (Le
We may think of
objective weathe
abstract and figur
Hals and Piet Mo
painting, then a
which Stevens h
Stevens knew th
home in a society
guzzlers, he pain
portrayed people
fishwives and tav
that Stevens cam
on the other ha
extreme of his Du
ogy, the abstract
the poet struggle
Mondrian abstract
He does this by m
the real, to and
does by placing i
"Plastic Art and
ways which closely
essay, and the po
dimension. Mond
spiritual significan
Today one is tired o
but successively jet
everything, and th
single truth. This i
vision. (Plastic Art,
Unable to accept
refuses to give up
making it in fact
Art and Pure Plast
To love things in re
a microcosmos in t
Craven, p. 282.
universal expression of reality. Precisely on ac

for things, non-figurative art does not aim at ren
lar appearance.34 (Plastic Art, 60)
Similarly, Stevens at this time conceive

figure" (Letters, 378):
My own way out toward the future involves a
role of the poet, who will somehow have to assi
ing to the imagination what it is losing at such
supporting what it has gained. (Letters, 340)
He deliberately conceived of his suprem

religion" (Letters, 348) and of his poetic t
thing as valid as the idea of God has been
was a means to this goal rather than an e
Mondrian.
This shared belief in the spiritual significance of art is an emphasis

on the primacy of content. Mondrian's purpose in writing "Plastic Art
and Pure Plastic Art" was to "clarify a little the content of art."36 He
refers to that content variously as "universal beauty" or "objective real?
ity," but it is always "abstract":
We repeat, that its content cannot be described, and that it is only through
pure plastics and through the execution of the work that it can be made
apparent. Through this indeterminable content the non-figurative work is
"fully human/' (Plastic Art, 61)
When Stevens chose as his central subject a supreme fiction which also
"cannot be described," he was setting himself an aesthetic objective
directly analogous to Mondrian's abstract content.37 Stevens was well
34 Mondrian's aesthetic theory was deeply influenced by his interest in Theosophy?see Robert P. Welsh,
"Mondrian and Theosophy," in Piet Mondrian 1872-1944: Centennial Exhibition, exhibition catalog (Guggenheim
Museum, 1971). For most of the pioneers of abstract painting (Kandinsky, Malevich, et al.), abstraction had a
spiritual significance. See Maurice Tuchman et al., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985 (Abbeville
Press, 1986); and Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, (Shambhala Press,
1988).
35 For the best recent discussion of the supreme fiction as a "religious surrogate" (203), see Milton J. Bates,
Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (University of California Press, 1985), Chapter Six.
36 Letter from Mondrian to Winifred Nicholson, September 4, 1936, quoted in The New Art?The New Life,
p. 288.
37 Stevens' insistence that ". . . in projecting a supreme fiction, I cannot imagine anything more fatal than
to state it definitely. . ." {Letters, p. 863) helps to explain, I think, why he avoided any direct reference in "It
Must Be Abstract" to abstract art, or to Mondrian in particular. Any concrete analogy for his method would be
as "fatal" to it as any definition would be to the supreme fiction itself. The only chance of success, therefore,
lay in remaining utterly silent about possible equivalents: "I have no idea of the form that a supreme fiction
would take. The NOTES start out with the idea that it would not take any form: that it would be abstract."
{Letters, p. 430); "Let us . . . not say that our abstraction is this, that or the other." {Letters. p. 438). Ironically,
this restriction meant that Stevens could not mention his chief analogy for exactly the radical kind of abstraction
he had in mind.
48
aware of this, and he recognized that his emphasis on content as the

chief concern of modern poetry set him in opposition to most other
contemporary poets in English:
... let me divide modern poetry into two classes, one that is modern in
respect to what it says, the other that is modern in respect to form. The
first kind is not interested primarily in form. The second is. (Angel, 167-168)
Stevens obviously included his own poetry in the first category, since
he often declared himself "indifferent" to poetic form: ". . . I have never
felt that form matters enough to allow myself to be control led by it"
(Letters, 817). The second category would include the poetry of William
Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and virtually every experimental move?
ment in modern poetry which conceived of innovation primarily in
terms of form. It is significant that this aspect of Stevens' poetry, which
sets him at the furthest remove from his poetic contemporaries, also
represents his closest affinity with the aesthetic theory of Mondrian. In
this respect, Stevens aligns himself with the abstract painters as a group,
who thought of Mondrian as an orthodox theorist of the movement. As
James Thrall Soby wrote in 1941, in a book which Stevens owned:
"[The abstract movement] continues to thrive, nourished on Picasso's
boundless energy, Mondrian's dogma, and Miro's inventiveness."38
Mondrian's "dogma" seems to have nourished Wallace Stevens' poetic
development as well, and this is surely part of what Stevens meant in
declaring, "It Must Be Abstract."
38 James Thrall Soby, Paintings, Drawings Prints: Salvador Dali (Museum of Modern Art, 1941), p.30.

Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction and Abstract Art-Glen McLeod PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Notes Towards A Supreme Fiction and Abstract Art-Glen McLeod PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

'Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction' and Abstract Art

Author(s): Glen McLeod

"'Notes Towards a Supreme

Both of these instances show Stevens anxiously avoiding the word

That's the down-town frieze,

. . . In this light a man is a result,

. . . The men have no shadows

Here we see Stevens deliberately distancing himself from abstract art,

In the violent context of modern life, the rational faculty of abstraction

6 Wallace Stevens, "The Common Life," 221.

That it was a stro

It seems clear tha

Stevens repeats this conception in "It Must Be Abstract" when he claims

The poet is clearly not referring to an abs

Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clou

Seventeenth-century Dutch painting may

Stevens is recalling the essay, "Linear Com

This notion that the quality of the imagina

The commonest idea of an imaginative object is something large. But ap?

The chief twentie

11 This observation helps t

13 Germany invaded the N

The most independent and

This book also reproduces in

the 1930s, the Wadsworth Atheneum in

15 Helen Searing, "From the Fogg to the Bauhaus: A Museum for

16 HartfordCourant, "New Avery Memorial Building," unsigned art

17 The centrality of architecture in the De Stijl movement help

Oud was born at Purmerend in 1890. His artistic heritage leads

Viollet-le-Duc was a major figure in the nineteenth-century movemen

18 Piet Mondrian, The Ne

19 Stevens wrote to Henr

20 Robert M. Coates, "The

21 A. Walton Litz, "Wallace

at Childs."22 The New Yorker made even gr

I suppose there is no other painter alive today wh

He might well have had Mondrian in mind when he concluded, in a

Are the ravishment

Who comes and g

The monastic man is an artist. . . .

Here the abstract "first idea" is suddenly personified as "the hermit" or

Stevens's own tendency to think in radical terms in "Notes" is evident

"Lines and Rectangles," 9.

point: like the concept of the "first idea,

that these reader

So Theo Van Does

In weighing the significance of such parallels between Stevens and

vens's achievement in "Notes" as a whole. Charles Altieri has called

Mondrian's didactic tone and aphoristic phrasing bear some resem-

The same dualistic

In the same way,

As when the cock c

Stevens's seemingly paradoxical demand

To achieve "dynamic equilibrium" involv

Stevens outlines a similar two-part cre

Stevens analyzes exactly this problem in

Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,

universal expression of reality. Precisely on ac

Similarly, Stevens at this time conceive

He deliberately conceived of his suprem

This shared belief in the spiritual significance of art is an emphasis

aware of this, and he recognized that his emphasis on content as the

You might also like