Short answers, pulled from the story.
František Kupka's Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs was exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in 1912, marking the moment abstract art arrived as a definitive break from the centuries-old tradition of representing reality. This exhibition occurred in Paris and signaled the end of Western art bound by the logic of perspective from the Renaissance through the middle of the 19th century.
Kazimir Malevich completed his first entirely abstract work, the Suprematist Black Square, in 1915. This work was deeply influenced by theosophy and spiritual philosophies, serving as a bridge between the material world and the divine.
The Bauhaus school was closed in 1932 as the Nazi party gained control in Germany. An exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst, in 1937 contained all types of avant-garde art disapproved of by the Nazi party, triggering an exodus of artists from Europe.
By the early 1940s, the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York. This shift occurred as European exiles brought rich cultural influences to New York, where local American painters distilled and built upon these influences.
Theodor W. Adorno argued that abstract art is a response to and a reflection of the growing abstraction of social relations in industrial society. Frederic Jameson saw modernist abstraction as a function of the abstract power of money, equating all things equally as exchange-values.