What Makes an Abstract Painting Good?
Frank Bowling, Passtheball, 2022. © Frank Bowling. Photo by Anna Arca. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Vivian Springford, Untitled (Tanzania Series), 1971. Courtesy of Phillips.
Ask a curator, artist, or auction house specialist what makes an abstract painting good, and they’ll counter with a different question: What counts as an abstract painting? Contemporary painters are often abstracting something—a figure, a landscape, a photograph, some art historical precedent, paint, or canvas itself—and few artists today aim for complete realistic fidelity. Suggestive or representational forms appear throughout artworks that we might quickly label “abstract,” while paintings we’d be inclined to describe as “figurative” are frequently invested in much more than the thing, scene, or person they ostensibly depict.
Yet aesthetic labeling can help us understand individual art practices and trends in the art world at large. For example, Artsy recently found that abstract paintings are most important to gallery sales. Auction houses group together modern and contemporary canvases to draw fruitful parallels between artists past and present. Meanwhile, curators present exhibitions of contemporary abstraction to explore the state of painting today. Painters themselves may have an entirely different set of criteria. These disparate interests give the art world its color—and make a question like “What makes an abstract painting good?” both impossible to answer and endlessly engaging.
What makes an artwork abstract?
A new exhibition at Gagosian’s London gallery, “To Bend the Ear of the Outer World: Conversations on contemporary abstract painting,” suggests the best approach is open-ended dialogue. The show includes paintings by more than 40 artists working throughout the Americas and Europe. Curator Gary Garrels shared his own conception of abstraction, which permeates the show. Abstract paintings speak in their own terms, he said, “not addressing things that are external to the painting itself. There’s no story, there’s no narrative, there’s no icon.”
In the catalogue essay, Garrels explained that this approach enables artists “to explore the widest variety of visual expression.” Abstraction allows them to “more fully engage subjectivity, emotional expression, decorative embellishment, complex metaphors, spiritual connection, and philosophical inquiry. They demand that the viewer be in the present moment, while inspiring reverie and an opening of the mind and imagination.”
Installation view of “To Bend the Ear of the Outer World - Conversations on contemporary abstract painting” at Gagosian, 2023. Photo by Lucy Dawkins. Courtesy of Gagosian.
A good abstract painting demands attention
Within the exhibition, contradictions abound. Vija Celmins’s Night Sky #22 (2015–18) is both a black painting filled with dots and smudges, and a depiction of a starry night sky—though it’s decidedly not “about” the cosmos. Suzan Frecon’s persian mare mars (2022) features massive volumes of bright, solid hues, yet the artist insists her works are “packed” with content. In the catalogue, she noted: “Landscape, architecture, human beings, and their consciousness: it is all there, but it’s not a depiction.” To create Rainbow Waterfall #6 (2022), Pat Steir relied on gravity and chance to let red, yellow, and green paint drip down an orange canvas, questioning the authorial intention in the work.
What makes these works and their peers within the exhibition “good”? “A really good painting can’t be readily resolved,” Garrels said. “It takes time. You want to come back and look at it, look at it more. It wants your attention.” A painting that you see and love immediately, he added, “probably lacks staying power.” While Garrels believes this is true of all painting, it’s especially true for abstraction. He also advocates for “connoisseurship”—the more you look at art, the more experiences you have with painting, and the more prepared you’ll be to assess and compare.
Suzan Frecon, persian mare mars, 2022. © Suzan Frecon. Photo by Robert McKeever. Courtesy of the artist, David Zwirner and Gagosian.
Abstract paintings are more difficult to judge
Patrizia Koenig, co-head of day sales at Phillips New York, explained that it’s easier to make such judgments about works that aren’t abstract. It’s simpler, she said, to claim: “This representational painting is perfectly executed.” She agreed with Garrels about connoisseurship and the value of careful study. “A lot of people find abstraction a harder language to grapple with,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s about training your eye, seeing what speaks to you…having an emotional response.”
Last year, the auction house curated a selection of paintings, titled “Women in Abstraction,” as part of its larger 20th-century and contemporary art day sale, “Afternoon Session.” Paintings by 20th-century luminary Helen Frankenthaler appeared alongside more recent works by contemporary artists including Lucy Bull, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Amy Sillman. Pricing varied, suggesting very literal, alternate valuations of these artists’ practices.
Helen Frankenthaler, Blue Dance, 1963. Courtesy of Phillips.
What makes an abstract painting valuable?
Which raises the question: Is there any correlation between how “good” an abstract painting is and how much it costs? Koenig thinks that’s the wrong question to ask. “The secondary market is a reflection of demand,” she said. A couple of factors—whether the colors are “commercial” (bright colors, Koenig noted, produce higher auction results) and whether an artwork looks similar to one that’s already in a museum collection—encourage competitive bidding. Past prices and specialist knowledge inform appraisals: Willem de Kooning’s abstract paintings from the late 1970s are coveted and achieve high prices, while his works from the late 1950s aren’t as highly valued, for instance. That doesn’t necessarily mean that one series is any better than another. Ultimately, she believes that “‘good or not’ is in the eye of the beholder.”
Artists themselves tend to ask different questions. “They reach a point where they feel the painting has found its voice and its identity,” said Garrels. “They say, ‘I can stop now.’”
Mark Bradford, Cloud Across a Sunny Field, 2023. © Mark Bradford. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
A good abstract painting elicits a response from the viewer
The Gagosian exhibition catalogue details artists’ personal ambitions and metrics for success. Mark Bradford, it explains, addresses the relationship between his work and the world outside his studio; he believes that to appreciate any abstract painting is to encounter a certain set of values, perspectives, and politics. Charline von Heyl hopes to establish a “relationship of now,” that the viewer is “actually in the moment in front of a painting and something happens”; and Tauba Auerbach wants her paintings to connect viewers with the divine, the catalogue says.
A relational approach to painting underlies such assessments. A “good” abstract painting elicits a particular response from the viewer. Yet even here there are exceptions—the artists whose intended audience resides beyond the material world. For Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint, her paintings were “good” if they themselves communicated with divinity.
Charline von Heyl, Circus, 2022. © Charline von Heyl. Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.
Tauba Auerbach, Grain - Standing Mandelbrot Quartet (Ventrella Variation), 2022. © Tauba Auerbach. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
A good abstract painting may never be fully understood
New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl reviewed af Klint’s 2018 exhibition at the Guggenheim, and was immediately “seized” by one painting: “No. 3, Youth…a knockout feat of abstract art, whatever its motivation,” he wrote. Schjeldahl described the painting’s suggestive forms, its colors, and its sense of balance. “The over-all stylistic effect is so fresh that the picture might have been made this morning or tomorrow or decades from now,” he wrote. Yet the writer concluded that he was naive to overlook the other canvases: af Klint’s paintings work in concert with each other. It’s her overall project that’s so noteworthy.
Schjeldahl’s language is telling. The critic—the only person whose actual job it is, really, to tell us what’s good and what’s not—wants to be “seized.” This echoes Garrels’s idea that a good abstract painting demands attention, which, of course, is subjective. Indeed, in response to this headline’s query, critic Jerry Saltz offered the tersest response. He replied, “I am inclined to say that what makes an abstract painting good is what makes any painting good: If I like it.”
Garrels refuses such tidy conclusions.“The nature of abstract painting is that you don’t ever get to a fully resolved understanding,” he said. “That’s part of the excitement. It keeps itself open. There’s no final resolution for a good painting.”
