The Rhetoric of Purity

In The Rhetoric of Purity, Mark Cheetham examines the resurgence of Neo-Platonist philosophy in France during the late nineteenth century and its critical role in the formation of the first wave of abstract painting at that time. Through analysis of the writings and art of Gauguin, Serusier, Mondrian, and Kandinsky, among others, he concludes that for these artists, purity was nothing less than the quality that painting must possess. Cheetham argues that the rhetoric of purity was originally inaugurated by Plato's vision of a perfect, non-mimetic art, and that the central founders of abstraction unambiguously responded to Plato through their new formal means of expression. The author also tests the desire for purity within the context of theoretical, art historical, social and political arguments that have traditionally regarded Abstraction as a methodological instrument, a means to essentialist ends, rather than as an end to itself. The influence of the philosophical tradition established by Hegel and Schopenhauer are examined in light of the development of modernism as well.