Why Abstract?

Hilaire Hiler belongs here twice over: before he was a theorist of color and abstraction he was a fixture of twenties Montparnasse — painter, jazz pianist, and the man who ran and decorated the Jockey, the little bar where the Quarter danced. By the forties he had landed, like Miller, in California, and their talk about painting became this book: Hiler's essay asking and answering the title question, with responses from Miller — who takes the occasion to preach his gospel of the amateur, the child's eye, and art as liberation — and William Saroyan, playing his own melody around the theme.

New Directions published the exchange in 1945, a season when abstraction was about to conquer American painting and still needed explaining. Nobody involved pretends to settle anything; the pleasure is the register — serious questions handled with café informality, the Montparnasse habit of turning aesthetics into conversation carried on two decades and one ocean later.

Three pieces in conversation. Hiler opens with the painter's case: why abstraction is not a hoax or a fashion but the logical next room of painting, argued from craft and color theory. Miller answers as the enthusiast-heretic — less interested in defending abstraction than in demolishing the idea that art needs defending, with detours through his own watercolor mania. Saroyan closes in his loose-limbed key, circling the question of why anyone makes anything at all.

An hour's read, best taken as eavesdropping: three working artists, one pot of coffee, the perennial argument.