Abstract art
A canvas in 1912 held a painting titled Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs. It measured 210 by 200 centimeters and hung in the Salon d'Automne in Paris. The work contained no recognizable objects from the visible world. This absence marked a departure from centuries of art history that relied on perspective to mimic reality. Abstract art uses shape, form, color, and line to create compositions independent of visual references. Some works retain partial links to nature while others bear no trace of anything recognizable. Geometric abstraction often excludes naturalistic entities entirely. Total abstraction exists at one end of a spectrum where figurative art resides at the other. Partial abstraction allows for conspicuous alterations to color or form without losing all connection to the source.
James McNeill Whistler painted Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket in 1874. He placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than the depiction of physical objects. Georgiana Houghton organized an exhibit in 1871 featuring spirit drawings that worked with abstract shapes. Her choice correlated with the unnatural nature of her subject during a time when abstraction was not yet a concept. Expressionists explored bold use of paint surface and drew distortions to portray psychological states of being. Edvard Munch and James Ensor produced emotionally charged paintings as reactions to Impressionism. Paul Cézanne began as an Impressionist but aimed to make a logical construction of reality based on a view from a single point. His modulated color in flat areas became the basis for Cubism. Mysticism expressed by theosophist Mme. Blavatsky had a profound impact on pioneer geometric artists like Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky.
Henri Matisse and Georges Braque revolutionized the Paris art world at the beginning of the 20th century. They created wild, multi-colored landscapes that critics called Fauvism. The raw language of color developed by the Fauves directly influenced Wassily Kandinsky. Cubism reduced all depiction of nature to cube, sphere, and cone. František Kupka exhibited his abstract painting Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs at the 1912 Salon d'Automne. Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists including Robert Delaunay Orphism. He defined it as pure art created entirely by the artist without borrowing from the visual sphere. Francis Picabia painted Caoutchouc around 1909 and Dances at the Spring in 1912. Kasimir Malevich completed his first entirely abstract work, Black Square, in 1915. Piet Mondrian evolved an abstract language of horizontal and vertical lines with rectangles of color between 1915 and 1919.
Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school at Weimar, Germany in 1919. The philosophy underlying the teaching program unified architecture, painting, weaving, and stained glass. Teachers included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and László Moholy-Nagy. The school moved to Dessau in 1925 before closing in 1932 as the Nazi party gained control. An exhibition of degenerate art called Entartete Kunst appeared in 1937 containing all types of avant-garde art disapproved of by the regime. Paul Klee went to Switzerland while many other artists fled to America. Ideas were able to cross-fertilize through artist's books, exhibitions, and manifestos during this era. David Burliuk held a second Knave of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow in January 1912 that included paintings sent from Munich and members of the German Die Brücke group.
By the early 1940s New York hosted main movements including expressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism, and dada. Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson, Max Ernst, and André Breton arrived as exiled Europeans. Local New York painters distilled these rich cultural influences and built upon them. Art galleries began to notice younger American artists who had begun to mature. Mark Rothko, born in Russia, dissolved his strongly surrealist imagery into powerful color compositions of the early 1950s. The expressionistic gesture became of primary importance to Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline. Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning evolved their figurative work into abstraction by the end of the decade. John D. Graham and Hans Hofmann served as important bridge figures between newly arrived European Modernists and younger American artists.
Donald Judd created Minimalist sculpture while Frank Stella painted hard-edge works in the United States. Lyrical Abstraction appeared with sensuous use of color in paintings by Patrick Heron, Kenneth Noland, Sam Francis, Cy Twombly, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Veronica Ruiz de Velasco. Op art and geometric abstraction emerged alongside abstract expressionism and monochrome painting during the second half of the 20th century. Piet Mondrian's Composition No. 10 from 1939 to 1942 characterized a radical but classical approach using primary colors, white ground, and black grid lines. Theo van Doesburg suggested a link between non-representational works and ideals of peace and spirituality. He stated that such art produces a most spiritual impression representing the repose of the soul.
Theodor W. Adorno offered an explanation linking growing prevalence of abstraction to industrial society. Such abstraction reflects the growing abstraction of social relations within modern culture. Frederic Jameson sees modernist abstraction as a function of the abstract power of money. He equates all things equally as exchange-values. The social content of abstract art is then precisely the abstract nature of social existence including legal formalities and bureaucratic impersonalization. Post-Jungians see quantum theories with their disintegration of conventional ideas of form and matter underlying the divorce of concrete and abstract in modern art. Artist Al Capp offered a simpler explanation stating abstract art was a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
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Common questions
What is abstract art and when did it emerge?
Abstract art uses shape, form, color, and line to create compositions independent of visual references. It emerged as a departure from centuries of art history that relied on perspective to mimic reality around 1912 with works like Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs.
Who painted Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket and what was its significance?
James McNeill Whistler painted Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket in 1874. He placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than the depiction of physical objects.
When did Henri Matisse and Georges Braque revolutionize the Paris art world?
Henri Matisse and Georges Braque revolutionized the Paris art world at the beginning of the 20th century. They created wild, multi-colored landscapes that critics called Fauvism.
Where was the Bauhaus school founded and when did it close?
Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school at Weimar, Germany in 1919. The school moved to Dessau in 1925 before closing in 1932 as the Nazi party gained control.
Which artists dissolved their surrealist imagery into powerful color compositions by the early 1950s?
Mark Rothko, born in Russia, dissolved his strongly surrealist imagery into powerful color compositions of the early 1950s. His work contributed to the main movements hosted by New York by the early 1940s including expressionism and abstraction.