Abstract art

• 1. Introduction

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  Abstract art uses the visual language of shape, form, color, and line to build a composition that can stand apart from anything visible in the world. For roughly four centuries, from the Renaissance to the middle of the 19th century, Western art rested on the logic of perspective and the effort to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. Then artists began pulling away from that illusion, sometimes slightly, sometimes completely. Al Capp dismissed the result as a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. Others saw something closer to a spiritual plane. How did painters reach a point where a single black square or two intersecting colors could count as a finished work? Who first dared to paint a picture that referred to nothing recognizable at all? And why did so many of them believe that geometry and the occult held the answer?

• 2. The Continuum Of Departure

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  Abstraction marks a departure from reality in depiction, and that departure can be slight, partial, or complete. It exists along a continuum rather than as a single fixed state. Artwork that takes liberties, altering color or form in ways that are conspicuous, can be called partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable, and in geometric abstraction one is unlikely to find any naturalistic entity at all.

  Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive, yet figurative and representational work often contains partial abstraction within it. Fauvism shows this clearly, since color there is conspicuously and deliberately altered against reality. Cubism does something similar by altering the very forms of the real entities it depicts. The terms non-figurative, non-objective, and non-representational all circle this same territory, with similar but perhaps not identical meanings, leaving room for the geometric and lyrical strains that tend toward the totally abstract.

• 3. Prophets Of A New Sensation

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  James McNeill Whistler placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than on the depiction of objects in his 1872 painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. That choice was an early intimation of a new kind of art. Even earlier, Georgiana Houghton made spirit drawings whose abstract shapes matched the unnatural nature of her subject, and she organized an exhibit in 1871, at a time when abstraction was not yet a concept.

  Three movements fed the development that followed: Romanticism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. An objective interest in what is seen runs from the paintings of John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, and Camille Corot through to the Impressionists, who carried on the plein air painting of the Barbizon school. Expressionist painters pushed in another direction, using bold paint surfaces, distortion, exaggeration, and intense color to portray psychological states of being. Edvard Munch and James Ensor drew mainly on the Post-Impressionists, yet they were instrumental to the advent of abstraction in the 20th century. Paul Cézanne, who began as an Impressionist, aimed to build a logical construction of reality from a single point with modulated color in flat areas, and that aim would later grow into Cubism.

• 4. The Spiritual Engine

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  Mme. Blavatsky, the theosophist, expressed an early modernist religious philosophy that had a profound impact on pioneer geometric artists like Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky. In late 19th century Eastern Europe, mysticism shaped the direction these painters would take. The teaching of Georges Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky influenced the early geometric styles of Piet Mondrian and his colleagues, while spiritualism also moved Kasimir Malevich and Frantisek Kupka.

  Kandinsky, an amateur musician, was drawn to the possibility of marks and associative color resounding in the soul. Charles Baudelaire had already suggested that all our senses respond to various stimuli yet connect at a deeper aesthetic level, so that visual art, as it grew more abstract, took on qualities of music with its abstract sounds and divisions of time. The Theosophical Society popularized the ancient wisdom of the sacred books of India and China in the early years of the century. Within that climate Mondrian, Kandinsky, af Klint, and others reached toward an objectless state, treating the circle, square, and triangle as universal and timeless shapes, fundamental systems underlying visible reality.

• 5. The Door Opens In Paris

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  Henri Matisse and several young artists, including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, Andre Derain, Raoul Dufy, and Jean Metzinger, revolutionized the Paris art world at the beginning of the 20th century with wild, multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figures that critics called Fauvism. The raw language of color the Fauves developed directly influenced Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstraction. Cubism, built on Cezanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to cube, sphere, and cone, joined Fauvism as the movement that opened the door to abstraction.

  During the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or, Frantisek Kupka exhibited his abstract painting Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists, including Robert Delaunay, Orphism, defining it as the art of painting new structures out of elements created entirely by the artist, a pure art. Between 1909 and 1913 a wave of experimental works pursued that pure art. Francis Picabia painted Caoutchouc around 1909 and Dances at the Spring in 1912. Kandinsky painted his Untitled First Abstract Watercolor in 1913 and Picture with a Circle in 1911. Delaunay made his Simultaneous Windows series, Leopold Survage created Colored Rhythm in 1913, and Mondrian painted Composition No. 11 in 1913. Matisse came very close to pure abstraction in French Window at Collioure and View of Notre-Dame, both 1914, and The Yellow Curtain from 1915.

• 6. Art Into Life

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  Black Square, Kasimir Malevich's first entirely abstract work, was completed in 1915 as a Suprematist statement. Within the same orbit, Liubov Popova created her Architectonic Constructions and Spatial Force Constructions between 1916 and 1921. Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov made Rayist drawings that used lines like rays of light to build a construction. Mondrian, meanwhile, evolved his language of horizontal and vertical lines with rectangles of color between 1915 and 1919, the Neo-Plasticism that he, Theo van Doesburg, and others in De Stijl meant to reshape the environment of the future.

  "Art into life!" was Vladimir Tatlin's slogan, and many Russian abstract artists became Constructivists who held that art was no longer remote but life itself. The artist was to become a technician using the tools and materials of modern production, and Varvara Stepanova and Alexandre Exter abandoned easel painting for theatre design and graphic work. On the other side, Malevich, Anton Pevsner, and Naum Gabo argued that art was essentially a spiritual activity meant to create the individual's place in the world. The revolutionary period from 1917 to 1921, when artists were free to experiment, was over by the mid-1920s, and by the 1930s only socialist realism was allowed. Pevsner went to France, Gabo went first to Berlin, then to England, then to America, and Kandinsky left for the Bauhaus.

• 7. Bauhaus And Exile

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  Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar, Germany in 1919, built on a philosophy of unity among all the visual and plastic arts, from architecture and painting to weaving and stained glass. That idea grew from the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the Deutscher Werkbund. Its teachers included Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The school moved to Dessau in 1925, and as the Nazi party gained control the Bauhaus was closed in 1932.

  The exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst, in 1937 gathered every type of avant-garde art the Nazi party disapproved of, and the exodus from Europe began in earnest. Paris in the 1930s hosted artists fleeing the rise of totalitarianism, where Sophie Tauber and Jean Arp collaborated using organic and geometric forms and the Polish Katarzyna Kobro applied mathematically based ideas to sculpture. Joaquin Torres-Garcia, assisted by Michel Seuphor, organized a Cercle et Carre exhibition of forty-six members, which Theo van Doesburg criticized as too indefinite before publishing the journal Art Concret. The first exhibition of British abstract art was held in England in 1935, followed in 1936 by the Abstract and Concrete exhibition organized by Nicolete Gray, which included Mondrian, Joan Miro, Barbara Hepworth, and Ben Nicholson. Hepworth, Nicholson, and Gabo then moved to St. Ives in Cornwall to continue their constructivist work.

• 8. New York And After

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  Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz, Andre Masson, Max Ernst, and Andre Breton were among the exiled Europeans who arrived in New York by the early 1940s, bringing expressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism, and dada with them. The climate of freedom in the city let these influences flourish, and galleries that had focused on European art began to notice younger American painters coming of age. Mondrian's Composition No. 10, painted between 1939 and 1942 with primary colors, a white ground, and black grid lines, defined his radical yet classical approach to the rectangle. Georgia O'Keeffe stood apart as a pure maverick, painting highly abstract forms without joining any group.

  John D. Graham and Hans Hofmann became bridge figures between the arrived European Modernists and the younger Americans who would form the Abstract expressionists and the New York School. Mark Rothko, born in Russia, moved from strongly surrealist imagery into the powerful color compositions of the early 1950s. The gesture and the act of painting itself became central to Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline, while the figurative work of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning evolved into abstraction by the end of the 1940s. Later permutations followed, from the Minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd and the paintings of Frank Stella to the sensuous color of Patrick Heron, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Cy Twombly. Theodor W. Adorno read all of this as a response to the growing abstraction of social relations in industrial society, while Frederic Jameson tied it to the abstract power of money, equating all things as exchange-values.