Georges Roque's 'Qu'est-ce que l'art abstrait ?' Reexamines Abstraction

Georges Roque's book 'Qu'est-ce que l'art abstrait ?', published by Gallimard in the Folio Essais collection, challenges conventional narratives of abstract art. The work coincides with the exhibition 'Aux Origines de l'abstraction' at the Musée d'Orsay. Roque divides the book into two parts: first, an examination of diverse historical meanings of 'abstraction'; second, an exploration of the linguistic model in European abstract painting. He argues that the term 'abstract' was not self-evident, tracing its usage from the 1880s in Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin through Fauvism. Roque disputes the notion that Maurice Denis's 1890 definition of painting prefigured non-figurative art. He also casts doubt on the influence of Worringer's 'Abstraction and Empathy' on Kandinsky's 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art', noting Worringer's retrospective perspective and lack of interest in non-figurative painting. Roque supports Jean-Paul Bouillon's hypothesis that Kandinsky's first definitively non-figurative works date from 1913, not 1910. The central thesis posits that linguistics influenced artists like Kupka, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich, who sought to make painting a system of signs, drawing on 19th-century ornamental grammar. Roque distinguishes abstraction from Greenbergian formalism and spiritualist interpretations, though the latter may be historically significant. The book concludes with an analysis of Stämpfli, the 'tire painter'.