Abstract Art Did Not Begin With Odili Donald Odita

It's time to challenge a long-held belief.

Over the weekend, John Yau added Rosalind Krauss to his roster of Jews who are responsible for the art world being a cesspit of white supremacy. Behold the opening paragraph for “Abstract Art Did Not Begin With Paul Cézanne”:

Odili Donald Odita challenges the long-held belief that abstract art began with Paul Cézanne, and that it is a purely Western tradition in which Pablo Picasso’s appropriation of African art played an important role. This is the tradition with which most abstract artists align themselves. In this narrative of art history, Europe is at the center and the rest of the world is on the margins. Starting in the 1940s, American artists and critics helped shift the center to New York. And critics such as Clement Greenberg, Donald Judd, and Rosalind Krauss helped to strengthen this perception.

Krauss joins Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Irving Sandler, and Lance Esplund as one of the kikes who supposedly make the art world such an unsatisfactory place, as I discussed last summer.

Mind you, nobody on earth thinks that abstract art began with Paul Cézanne, or that it is a purely Western tradition, particularly in 2023. Neither Greenberg, nor Judd, nor Krauss ever suggested as much. So who holds this “long-held belief”? Yau doesn’t say.

We have a 77,000-year-old piece of carved ochre attesting to the fact that abstract art showed up early in human history, in Africa. Pattern detection is an innate function of mammalian intelligence and visual patterns have been discovered independently by every people gracing the planet.

The idea that one could put an abstract arrangement into a European format intended to support figurative pictures, the framed oil painting on canvas, and nevertheless deliver an analogous pictorial experience, naturally began in Europe. Cézanne’s concern was not abstraction per se. Picasso, in drawing on Cézanne, was likewise primarily preoccupied with depiction rather than shape. As usual, the germane paragraph of Greenberg is incandescent:

Cézanne’s discovery that the eye, by closely following the direction of surfaces, could resolve all visual substance into a continuum of frontal planes had given painters a new incentive to the exploration of both nature and their medium - and a rule, at the same time, to guarantee the coherence of the result. Picasso, Braque, and Léger were able to apply this rule fully in terms of their own temperaments, and for three or four years all three artists turned out a well-nigh unbroken series of works that were flawless in their unity and abundant in their matter, works in which there was a fusion of power and elegance that abated neither. Then, for them, the matter of Analytical Cubism was exhausted and the rule lapsed. Henceforth, neither they nor any other artist could expand taste by quite the same means; to continue using these meant depending on taste instead of creating it.¹

One runs into this repeatedly in Greenberg, the appreciation of how fickle and short-lived is inspiration, even for the giants. In any case, that four-year period was the extent of that particular strain of abstraction’s manifestation as a purely Western tradition. With Picasso’s incorporation of forms he saw in Paris’s ethnographic collections, “purely” is pushing it. Nevertheless it’s possible to imagine a pathway from Cézanne to geometric abstraction without Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. The same can’t be said of the easel picture convention itself, upon which our current conception of the abstract painting relies, and which we owe to some clever 15th-century Venetians. It’s not an accident that the first non-Western manifestations of that particular strain of abstraction took place among the Russian avant-garde, which had adopted the easel-painting convention thoroughly. This is the tradition to which current abstractionists align themselves, not Western-ness as such but certain conventions of picture-making and materials. It would have been tiresome for Greenberg, Judd, and Krauss to specify, every time they wrote about abstraction, that they were not referring to all abstraction made by any people in any place in any medium on any surface since the beginning of time. Context makes that clear enough, unless you set out to misunderstand them, and present your own bad faith as if it were their malignant neglect.

Which brings us back to Yau. Speaking of depending on taste instead of creating it:

Odita’s brightly colored geometric paintings on reconstituted wood veneer register all the different ways that he has stepped away from the white masterpiece tradition in which the artist applies oil paint to large swaths of canvas or linen…. Conceptually, it seems that he has thought his way through Western abstraction and the parallel movement of pattern and decoration, which often relies on repetition, as well as Op Art and its reliance on optical illusion. Whatever traces remain of these styles in Odita’s art, the viewer can be assured that he has done something to them. 

What a mess. Op Art and P&D are movements of Western abstraction. The Oditas evince obvious debts to the artists of Post-Painterly Abstraction and their fellow travelers on the West Coast. A lot of them are in fact painted on large swaths of canvas. I’m not sure what is the “white masterpiece tradition,” but I do know that the works under consideration are selling at a tony New York City art gallery as certified artist’s originals for prices between $100,000 and $200,000. No doubt “he has done something to” those aforementioned Western styles. Such somethings are possible because, like so many other contributions of Western culture, they attach to a broad humanism that depends neither on the race of its originators nor that of its adopters.

While the opposition to whiteness and Western-ness is not evident in the work, it makes itself known in the artist statement:

What is the threat to democracy? What would the opposite of democracy look like? Could it be exemplified by those living under the multi-color/multi-cultured pretense that “everyone is welcome to work hard and be given the opportunity to succeed and prosper,” all the while realizing in a long and downward-spiral the farcical lie that is conditionally embedded into this belief. In this whitescape, it is ultimately the will of Power to attack the mind and senses in order to make one senseless, helpless, and thus hopeless.

Whatever you say, Mr. Millionaire Artist Man. Let’s talk about the swastika in this painting.

Odili Donald Odita, Global, 50 x 50 x 1 3/4 inches, acrylic latex paint on aluminum-core fabricated wood panel with reconstituted wood veneer, 2022, source

Something about contemporary race politics is causing these two men’s souls to deteriorate. Yau is blithering and letting slip his antisemitism again. Odita looked at the design for Global and decided, yes, that does not look at all like a proposed logo for the Desert Southwest Neo-Nazi Modern Art Society, and it should be committed forthwith to a four-foot-plus panel and sold for money.

The long arc of history bends towards justice, said Reverend King. But the arc of social justice bends towards that stereotypical uncle who gets a couple of drinks in him and starts nattering about the yids. We all thought that was a white phenomenon, but apparently it has analogues among black and Asian people as well, even in the artsy set. Yau can’t point to someone who says that abstract art began with Cézanne for the same reason that the uncle can’t point to the specific Jew who controls Hollywood. Such people only exist as figments of bigoted imagination.

Because I’m not a woke idiot, I have no interest in seeing Yau or Odita being made to suffer material consequences for their respective expressions. All I’m saying is that it’s okay to recognize, and state publicly, that Odita is an adequate painter and that Yau is no longer useful as a critic. Odita is neither a better artist nor Yau a better writer for their declared commitments to racial justice. It is possible that they’re worse for them. Culture is not bad (or good) for being Western; it is not good (or bad) for not being Western.

But that much is obvious even to all the art worlders who consent to live by lies. Here’s something possibly more surprising: it would be useful to start thinking of racism as “belief in race,” just as polytheism is belief in multiple gods. If pale-complected ghosts with benighted ideas about art history are haunting your cobwebbed cranium, you’re a racist. If you look out on the world and see a “whitescape,” you’re a racist. Not in the conventional sense, but in the sense that your existential modus operandi is race. At that point it may be worth considering whether you’re a racist in the conventional sense as well. Even conventionally, if you think of whiteness as a debased condition, then singling out Jews for the associated sins is antisemitic.

Ibram X. Kendi declared that it’s impossible to be a non-racist; you must be expressly anti-racist or you’re a racist. According to my definition of racism, it’s impossible to be an anti-racist; you must be expressly non-racist or you’re a racist. If you don’t want to be a racist, stop believing in race and start believing in universally shared humanity.

I’m glad that I could clear up the long-held belief that abstract art began with Odili Donald Odita. Who ever suggested such a thing? I don’t feel the need to say.

1. Art And Culture, p. 101.