bstract art

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Wassily Kandinsky, Kandinsky's first abstract watercolor, 1910.

Robert Delaunay, 1912–13, Le Premier Disque, 134 cm (52.7 in.), Private collection.

Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which
may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. [1] Western art had
been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic
of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other
than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual
experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind
of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and
philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse,
and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time. [2]
Abstract art, non-figurative art, non-objective art, and nonrepresentational art are loosely related
terms. They are similar, but perhaps not of identical meaning.
 Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from
accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum.
Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least
theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes
liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially
abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric
abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and
total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational (or realistic) art
often contains partial abstraction.
Both geometric abstraction and lyrical abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very
numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which
color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which blatantly alters the
forms of the real life entities depicted. [3][4]

Contents
  [hide] 

 1History
 2Abstraction in early art and many cultures
 319th century
 420th century
 5Music
 6Russian avant-garde
 7The Bauhaus
 8Abstraction in Paris and London
 9America: mid-century
 10Later developments
 11Causation
 12Gallery
 13See also
 14References
 15Sources
 16External links

History[edit]
Main articles: History of painting and Western painting

Abstraction in early art and many cultures[edit]

Main articles: Prehistoric art and Eastern art history
Much of the art of earlier cultures – signs and marks on pottery, textiles, and inscriptions and
paintings on rock – used simple, geometric and linear forms which might have had a symbolic or
decorative purpose.[5] It is at this level of visual meaning that abstract art communicates. [6] One can
enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy or Islamic calligraphy without being able to read it.[7]
"Immortal in splashed ink", Liang Kai, China, 12th century

In Chinese painting, abstraction can be traced to the Tang dynasty painter Wang Mo (王墨), who is
credited to have invented the splashed-ink painting style. [8] While none of his paintings remain, this
style is clearly seen in some Song Dynasty Paintings. The Chan buddhist painter Liang Kai (梁楷,
c.1140–1210) applied the style to figure painting in his "Immortal in splashed ink" in which accurate
representation is sacrificed to enhance spontaneity linked to the non-rational mind of the
enlightened. A late Song painter named Yu Jian, adept to Tiantai buddhism, created a series of
splashed ink landscapes that eventually inspired many Japanese zen painters. His paintings show
heavily misty mountains in which the shapes of the objects are barely visible and extremely
simplified. This type of painting was continued by Sesshu Toyo in his later years.

"Mountain market, clearing Mist", Yu Jian, China

Another instance of abstraction in Chinese painting is seen in Zhu Derun's "Cosmic Circle". On the
left side of this painting is a pine tree in rocky soil, its branches laced with vines that extend in a
disorderly manner to the right side of the painting in which a perfect circle (probably made with help
of a compass[9]) floats in the void. The painting is a reflection of the Daoist metaphysics in which
chaos and reality are complementary stages of the regular course of nature. In Tokugawa Japan
some zen monk-painters created Enso, a circle who represents the absolute enlightenment. Usually
made in one spontaneous brush stroke, it became the paradigm of the minimalist aesthetic that
guided part of the zen painting.
19th century[edit]
Main articles: Romanticism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Expressionism
Patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable
of providing a livelihood for artists.[10][11]
Three art movements which contributed to the development of abstract art
were Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism. Artistic independence for artists was
advanced during the 19th century. An objective interest in what is seen, can be discerned from the
paintings of John Constable, J M W Turner, Camille Corot and from them to the Impressionists who
continued the plein air painting of the Barbizon school.

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket(1874), Detroit Institute of Arts. A near
abstraction, in 1877 Whistler sued the art critic John Ruskin for libel after the critic condemned this painting.
Ruskin accused Whistler of "ask[ing] two hundred guineas for throwing a pot of paint in the public's face."[12][13]

Early intimations of a new art had been made by James McNeill Whistler who, in his
painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The falling Rocket, (1872), placed greater emphasis on visual
sensation than the depiction of objects.
Expressionist painters explored the bold use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations,
and intense color. Expressionists produced emotionally charged paintings that were reactions to and
perceptions of contemporary experience; and reactions to Impressionismand other more
conservative directions of late 19th-century painting. The Expressionists drastically changed the
emphasis on subject matter in favor of the portrayal of psychological states of being. Although artists
like Edvard Munch and James Ensor drew influences principally from the work of the Post-
Impressionists they were instrumental to the advent of abstraction in the 20th century. Paul
Cézanne had begun as an Impressionist but his aim – to make a logical construction of reality based
on a view from a single point,[14] with modulated color in flat areas – became the basis of a new visual
art, later to be developed into Cubism by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.
Henri Matisse, The Yellow Curtain, 1915. With his Fauvist color and drawing Matisse comes very close to pure
abstraction.

Additionally in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe mysticism and early modernist religious

philosophy as expressed by theosophist Mme. Blavatsky had a profound impact on
pioneer geometric artists like Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky. The mystical teaching
of Georges Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky also had an important influence on the early formations of
the geometric abstract styles of Piet Mondrian and his colleagues in the early 20th century.[15]

20th century[edit]
Main articles: Western painting, Fauvism, and Cubism
Post Impressionism as practiced by Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and Paul
Cézanne had an enormous impact on 20th-century art and led to the advent of 20th-century
abstraction. The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was essential
for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several
other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice
de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and
figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. With his expressive use of color and his free and
imaginative drawing Henri Matisse comes very close to pure abstraction in French Window at
Collioure (1914), View of Notre-Dame(1914), and The Yellow Curtain from 1915. The raw language
of color as developed by the Fauves directly influenced another pioneer of abstraction, Wassily
Kandinsky (see illustration).
Although Cubism ultimately depends upon subject matter, it became, along with Fauvism, the art
movement that directly opened the door to abstraction in the 20th century. Pablo Picasso made his
first cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three
solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso
dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five
prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own
new Cubist inventions. Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges
Braque, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was
followed by Synthetic cubism, practiced by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert
Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and others into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the
introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of
merged subject matter. The collage artists like Kurt Schwitters and Man Ray and others taking the
clue from Cubism were instrumental to the development of the movement called Dada.

František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors), 1912, oil on canvas, 210 x 200
cm, Narodni Galerie, Prague. Published in Au Salon d'Automne "Les Indépendants" 1912, Exhibited at the
1912 Salon d'Automne, Paris.

Robert Delaunay, 1912, Windows Open Simultaneously (First Part, Third Motif), oil on canvas, 45.7 x 37.5
cm, Tate Modern

The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism in 1909, which later
inspired artists such as Carlo Carra in Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells and Umberto
BoccioniTrain in Motion, 1911, to a further stage of abstraction that would, along with Cubism,
profoundly influenced art movements throughout Europe. [16]
During the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or the poet Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several
artists including Robert, Orphism.[17] He defined it as, the art of painting new structures out of
elements that have not been borrowed from the visual sphere, but had been created entirely by the
artist...it is a pure art.[18]
Since the turn of the century, cultural connections between artists of the major European cities had
become extremely active as they strove to create an art form equal to the high aspirations
of modernism. Ideas were able to cross-fertilize by means of artist's books, exhibitions
and manifestosso that many sources were open to experimentation and discussion, and formed a
basis for a diversity of modes of abstraction. The following extract from 'The World Backwards' gives
some impression of the inter-connectedness of culture at the time: "David Burliuk's knowledge of
modern art movements must have been extremely up-to-date, for the second Knave of Diamonds
exhibition, held in January 1912 (in Moscow) included not only paintings sent from Munich, but some
members of the German Die Brücke group, while from Paris came work by Robert Delaunay, Henri
Matisseand Fernand Léger, as well as Picasso. During the Spring David Burliuk gave two lectures
on cubism and planned a polemical publication, which the Knave of Diamonds was to finance. He
went abroad in May and came back determined to rival the almanac Der Blaue Reiter which had
emerged from the printers while he was in Germany". [19]
From 1909 to 1913 many experimental works in the search for this 'pure art' had been created:
by Hilma af Klint; Francis Picabia painted Caoutchouc, 1909,[20] The Spring, 1912,[21]Dances at the
Spring[22] and The Procession, Seville, 1912;[23] Wassily Kandinsky painted Untitled (First Abstract
Watercolor), 1910,[24] Improvisation 21A, the Impression series, and Picture with a Circle (1911);
[25]
 František Kupka had painted the Orphist works, Discs of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colors),
1912[26] and Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors), 1912; Robert
Delaunay painted a series entitled Simultaneous Windows and Formes Circulaires, Soleil n°2 (1912–
13);[27] Léopold Survage created Colored Rhythm (Study for the film), 1913;[28] Piet Mondrian,
painted Tableau No. 1 and Composition No. 11, 1913.[29]

Wassily Kandinsky, On White 2, 1923

And the search continued: The Rayist (Luchizm) drawings of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail

Larionov, used lines like rays of light to make a construction. Kasimir Malevich completed his first
entirely abstract work, the Suprematist, 'Black Square', in 1915. Another of the Suprematist
group' Liubov Popova, created the Architectonic Constructions and Spatial Force Constructions
between 1916 and 1921. Piet Mondrian was evolving his abstract language, of horizontal and
vertical lines with rectangles of color, between 1915 and 1919, Neo-Plasticism was the aesthetic
which Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and other in the group De Stijl intended to reshape the
environment of the future.

Music[edit]
As visual art becomes more abstract, it develops some characteristics of music: an art form which
uses the abstract elements of sound and divisions of time. Wassily Kandinsky, himself a musician,
was inspired by the possibility of marks and associative color resounding in the soul. The idea had
been put forward by Charles Baudelaire, that all our senses respond to various stimuli but the
senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level.
Closely related to this, is the idea that art has The spiritual dimension and can transcend 'every-day'
experience, reaching a spiritual plane. The Theosophical Society popularized the ancient wisdom of
the sacred books of India and China in the early years of the century. It was in this context that Piet
Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint and other artists working towards an 'objectless state'
became interested in the occult as a way of creating an 'inner' object. The universal and timeless
shapes found in geometry: the circle, square and triangle become the spatial elements in abstract
art; they are, like color, fundamental systems underlying visible reality.
Russian avant-garde[edit]

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1923, The Russian Museum

Main articles: Russian avant-garde and Futurism (art)

Many of the abstract artists in Russia became Constructivists believing that art was no longer
something remote, but life itself. The artist must become a technician, learning to use the tools and
materials of modern production. Art into life! was Vladimir Tatlin's slogan, and that of all the future
Constructivists. Varvara Stepanova and Alexandre Exter and others abandoned easel painting and
diverted their energies to theatre design and graphic works. On the other side stood Kazimir
Malevich, Anton Pevsner and Naum Gabo. They argued that art was essentially a spiritual activity; to
create the individual's place in the world, not to organize life in a practical, materialistic sense. Many
of those who were hostile to the materialist production idea of art left Russia. Anton Pevsner went to
France, Gabo went first to Berlin, then to England and finally to America. Kandinsky studied in
Moscow then left for the Bauhaus. By the mid-1920s the revolutionary period (1917 to 1921) when
artists had been free to experiment was over; and by the 1930s only socialist realism was allowed.[30]

The Bauhaus[edit]
The Bauhaus at Weimar, Germany was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius.[31] The philosophy
underlying the teaching program was unity of all the visual and plastic arts from architecture and
painting to weaving and stained glass. This philosophy had grown from the ideas of the Arts and
Crafts movement in England and the Deutscher Werkbund. Among the teachers were Paul
Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and László Moholy-Nagy. In
1925 the school was moved to Dessau and, as the Nazi party gained control in 1932, The Bauhaus
was closed. In 1937 an exhibition of degenerate art, 'Entartete Kunst' contained all types of avant-
garde art disapproved of by the Nazi party. Then the exodus began: not just from the Bauhaus but
from Europe in general; to Paris, London and America. Paul Klee went to Switzerland but many of
the artists at the Bauhaus went to America.

Abstraction in Paris and London[edit]

Kurt Schwitters, Das Undbild, 1919, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

During the 1930s Paris became the host to artists from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and other
European countries affected by the rise of totalitarianism. Sophie Tauber and Jean Arp collaborated
on paintings and sculpture using organic/geometric forms. The Polish Katarzyna Kobro applied
mathematically based ideas to sculpture. The many types of abstraction now in close proximity led to
attempts by artists to analyse the various conceptual and aesthetic groupings. An exhibition by forty-
six members of the Cercle et Carré group organized by Joaquin Torres-Garcia[32] assisted by Michel
Seuphor[33] contained work by the Neo-Plasticists as well as abstractionists as varied as Kandinsky,
Anton Pevsner and Kurt Schwitters. Criticized by Theo van Doesburg to be too indefinite a collection
he published the journal Art Concret setting out a manifesto defining an abstract art in which the line,
color and surface only, are the concrete reality. [34] Abstraction-Création founded in 1931 as a more
open group, provided a point of reference for abstract artists, as the political situation worsened in
1935, and artists again regrouped, many in London. The first exhibition of British abstract art was
held in England in 1935. The following year the more international Abstract and Concrete exhibition
was organized by Nicolete Gray including work by Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Barbara
Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Hepworth, Nicholson and Gabo moved to the St. Ives group in
Cornwall to continue their 'constructivist' work.[35]

America: mid-century[edit]
Main articles: Modernism, Late modernism, American Modernism, and Surrealism
The above is a 1939–42 oil on canvas painting by Mondrian titled "Composition No. 10". Responding to it,
fellow De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg suggested a link between non-representational works of art and ideals
of peace and spirituality.[36]

During the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s many artists fled Europe to the United States. By the
early 1940s the main movements in modern art, expressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism,
and dada were represented in New York: Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Jacques
Lipchitz, André Masson, Max Ernst, André Breton, were just a few of the exiled Europeans who
arrived in New York.[37] The rich cultural influences brought by the European artists were distilled and
built upon by local New York painters. The climate of freedom in New York allowed all of these
influences to flourish. The art galleries that primarily had focused on European art began to notice
the local art community and the work of younger American artists who had begun to mature. Certain
artists at this time became distinctly abstract in their mature work. During this period Piet Mondrian's
painting Composition No. 10, 1939–1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black
grid lines clearly defined his radical but classical approach to the rectangle and abstract art in
general. Some artists of the period defied categorization, such as Georgia O'Keeffe who, while a
modernist abstractionist, was a pure maverick in that she painted highly abstract forms while not
joining any specific group of the period.
Eventually American artists who were working in a great diversity of styles began to coalesce into
cohesive stylistic groups. The best known group of American artists became known as the Abstract
expressionists and the New York School. In New York City there was an atmosphere which
encouraged discussion and there was new opportunity for learning and growing. Artists and
teachers John D. Grahamand Hans Hofmann became important bridge figures between the newly
arrived European Modernists and the younger American artists coming of age. Mark Rothko, born in
Russia, began with strongly surrealist imagery which later dissolved into his powerful color
compositions of the early 1950s. The expressionistic gesture and the act of painting itself, became of
primary importance to Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. While during the
1940s Arshile Gorky's and Willem de Kooning's figurative work evolved into abstraction by the end of
the decade. New York City became the center, and artists worldwide gravitated towards it; from
other places in America as well.[38]

Later developments[edit]
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 message)
Main articles: Abstract expressionism, Color field, Lyrical abstraction, Post-painterly
abstraction, Sculpture, and Minimal art
Digital art, hard-edge painting, geometric abstraction, minimalism, lyrical abstraction, op art, abstract
expressionism, color field painting, monochrome painting, assemblage, neo-Dada, shaped
canvas painting, are a few directions relating to abstraction in the second half of the 20th century.
In the United States, Art as Object as seen in the Minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd and the
paintings of Frank Stella are seen today as newer permutations. Other examples include Lyrical
Abstraction and the sensuous use of color seen in the work of painters as diverse as Robert
Motherwell, Patrick Heron, Kenneth Noland, Sam Francis, Cy Twombly, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen
Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell.

Causation[edit]
One socio-historical explanation that has been offered for the growing prevalence of the abstract in
modern art – an explanation linked to the name of Theodor W. Adorno – is that such abstraction is a
response to, and a reflection of, the growing abstraction of social relations in industrial society.[39]
Frederic Jameson similarly sees modernist abstraction as a function of the abstract power of money,
equating all things equally as exchange-values.[40] The social content of abstract art is then precisely
the abstract nature of social existence – legal formalities, bureaucratic impersonalization,
information/power – in the world of late modernity.[41]
Post-Jungians by contrast would see the quantum theories with their disintegration of conventional
ideas of form and matter as underlying the divorce of the concrete and the abstract in modern art. [42]

Gallery[edit]
 Albert Gleizes, 1910–12, Les Arbres (The Trees), oil on canvas, 41 x 27 cm. Reproduced in Du
"Cubisme", 1912
 
 Arthur Dove, 1911–12, Based on Leaf Forms and Spaces, pastel on unidentified support. Now
lost
 
 Francis Picabia, 1912, Tarentelle, oil on canvas, 73.6 x 92.1 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme"
 

Wassily Kandinsky, 1912, Improvisation 27 (Garden of LoveII), oil on canvas, 120.3 x 140.3 cm,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show
  
 Pablo Picasso, 1913–14, Head(Tête), cut and pasted colored paper, gouache and charcoal on
paperboard, 43.5 x 33 cm, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
 

Henri Matisse, 1914, French Window at Collioure, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

 

Hilma af Klint, Svanen (The Swan), No. 17, Group IX, Series SUW, October 1914-March 1915. This
abstract work was never exhibited during af Klint's lifetime.
 

Theo van Doesburg, Neo-Plasticism: 1917, Composition VII(The Three Graces)

 
 

Fernand Léger 1919, The Railway Crossing, oil on canvas, 53.8 x 64.8 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago
 
 Joseph Csaky, Deux figures, 1920, relief, limestone, polychrome, 80 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum,
Otterlo
 
 Albert Gleizes, 1921, Composition bleu et jaune(Composition jaune), oil on canvas, 200.5 x
110 cm
 
 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray, 1921, Art Institute of
Chicago
 

Paul Klee, Fire in the Evening, 1929

 

Otto Gustaf Carlsund, Rapid(1930), a Concrete Art restaurant mural, Stockholm

 
 

Barnett Newman, Onement 1, 1948, Museum of Modern Art, New York