Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 History
Main articles: History of painting and Western painting
Robert Delaunay, 191213, Le Premier Disque, 134 cm (52.7
in.), Private collection.
Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form, color 1.1 Abstraction in early art and many cul-
and line to create a composition which may exist with
a degree of independence from visual references in the
tures
world.[1] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up
to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the Main articles: Prehistoric art and Eastern art history
logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illu-
sion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the Much of the art of earlier cultures signs and marks on
European had become accessible and showed alternative pottery, textiles, and inscriptions and paintings on rock
ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the was simple, geometric and linear forms which might have
end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a had a symbolic or decorative purpose.[5] It is at this level
new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental of visual meaning that abstract art communicates. One
changes taking place in technology, science and philoso- can enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy or Islamic
1
2 1 HISTORY
instrumental to the advent of abstraction in the 20th cen- olutionized the Paris art world with wild, multi-colored,
tury. expressive landscapes and gure paintings that the critics
Additionally in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe called Fauvism. With his expressive use of color and his
mysticism and early modernist religious philosophy as free and imaginative drawing Henri Matisse comes very
expressed by theosophist Mme. Blavatsky had a pro- close to pure abstraction in French Window at Collioure
found impact on pioneer geometric artists like Hilma af (1914), View of Notre-Dame (1914), and The Yellow Cur-
Klint and Wassily Kandinsky. The mystical teaching of tain from 1915. The raw language of color as developed
Georges Gurdjie and P.D. Ouspensky also had an im- by the Fauves directly inuenced another pioneer of ab-
portant inuence on the early formations of the geometric straction, Wassily Kandinsky (see illustration).
abstract styles of Piet Mondrian and his colleagues in the Although Cubism ultimately depends upon subject mat-
early 20th century.[12] ter, it became, along with Fauvism, the art movement
that directly opened the door to abstraction in the 20th
century. Pablo Picasso made his rst cubist paintings
1.3 20th century based on Czannes idea that all depiction of nature can
be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With
Main articles: Western painting, Fauvism, and Cubism the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso
dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting
Post Impressionism as practiced by Paul Gauguin, a raw and primitive brothel scene with ve prostitutes,
Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Czanne had violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal
an enormous impact on 20th-century art and led to the ad- masks and his own new Cubist inventions. Analytic cu-
vent of 20th-century abstraction. The heritage of painters bism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges
like Van Gogh, Czanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was essen- Braque, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism,
tial for the development of modern art. At the begin- the rst clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by
ning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other Synthetic cubism, practiced by Braque, Picasso, Fernand
young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, Lger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and
Andr Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck rev- others into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized
4 1 HISTORY
by the introduction of dierent textures, surfaces, collage Smells and Umberto Boccioni Train in Motion, 1911, to a
elements, papier coll and a large variety of merged sub- further stage of abstraction and profoundly inuenced art
ject matter. The collage artists like Kurt Schwitters and movements throughout Europe.[13]
Man Ray and others taking the clue from Cubism were During the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or the poet
instrumental to the development of the movement called Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists
Dada. including Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Orphism.[14] He
dened it as, the art of painting new structures out of ele-
ments that have not been borrowed from the visual sphere,
but had been created entirely by the artist...it is a pure
art.[15]
Since the turn of the century, cultural connections be-
tween artists of the major European and American 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 artists
books, exhibitions and manifestos so that many sources
were open to experimentation and discussion, and formed
a basis for a diversity of modes of abstraction. The fol-
lowing extract from,'The World Backwards, gives some
impression of the inter-connectedness of culture at the
time: 'David Burliuk's knowledge of modern art move-
ments must have been extremely up-to-date, for the sec-
ond Knave of Diamonds exhibition, held in January 1912
(in Moscow) included not only paintings sent from Mu-
Frantiek Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in nich, but some members of the German Die Brcke
Two Colors), 1912, oil on canvas, 210 x 200 cm, Narodni Ga- group, while from Paris came work by Robert Delaunay,
lerie, Prague. Published in Au Salon d'Automne Les Indpen- Henri Matisse and Fernand Lger, as well as Picasso.
dants 1912, Exhibited at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, Paris. During the Spring David Burliuk gave two lectures on
cubism and planned a polemical publication, which the
Knave of Diamonds was to nance. 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'.
From 1909 to 1913 many experimental works in the
search for this 'pure art' had been created: Francis Pi-
cabia painted Caoutchouc, 1909,[16] The Spring, 1912,[17]
Dances at the Spring[18] and The Procession, Seville,
1912;[19] Wassily Kandinsky painted Untitled (First Ab-
stract Watercolor), 1910,[20] Improvisation 21A, the Im-
pression series, and Picture with a Circle (1911);[21]
Frantiek Kupka had painted the Orphist works, Discs of
Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colors), 1912[22] and
Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors),
1912; Robert Delaunay painted a series entitled Simulta-
neous Windows and Formes Circulaires, Soleil n2 (1912
13);[23] Lopold Survage created Colored Rhythm (Study
for the lm), 1913;[24] Piet Mondrian, painted Tableau
No. 1 and Composition No. 11, 1913.[25]
And the search continued: The Rayist (Luchizm) draw-
ings of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, used
lines like rays of light to make a construction. Kasimir
Robert Delaunay, 1912, Windows Open Simultaneously (First Malevich completed his rst entirely abstract work, the
Part, Third Motif), oil on canvas, 45.7 x 37.5 cm, Tate Modern Suprematist, 'Black Square', in 1915. Another of the
Suprematist group' Liubov Popova, created the Archi-
The Italian poet Marinetti published 'The Founding and tectonic Constructions and Spatial Force Constructions
Manifesto of Futurism' in 1909, which inspired artists between 1916 and 1921. Piet Mondrian was evolving
such as Carlo Carra in Painting of Sounds, Noises and
1.5 Russian avant-garde 5
the school was moved to Dessau and, as the Nazi party exhibition of British abstract art was held in England in
gained control in 1932, The Bauhaus was closed. In 1937 1935. The following year the more international Abstract
an exhibition of degenerate art, 'Entartete Kunst' con- and Concrete exhibition was organised by Nicolete Gray
tained all types of avant-garde art disapproved of by the including work by Piet Mondrian, Joan Mir, Barbara
Nazi party. Then the exodus began: not just from the Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Hepworth, Nicholson and
Bauhaus but from Europe in general; to Paris, London Gabo moved to the St. Ives group in Cornwall to continue
and America. Paul Klee went to Switzerland but many of their 'constructivist' work.[31]
the artists at the Bauhaus went to America.
clearly dened his radical but classical approach to the Joan Mitchell, among others.
rectangle and abstract art in general. Some artists of the There was a resurgence after the war and into the
period deed categorization, such as Georgia O'Keee 1950s of the gurative, as neo-Dada, uxus, happening,
who, while a modernist abstractionist, was a pure mav- conceptual art, neo-expressionism, installation art,
erick in that she painted highly abstract forms while not performance art, video art and pop art have come to
joining any specic group of the period. signify the age of consumerism. The distinction between
Eventually American artists who were working in a great abstract and gurative art has, over the last twenty years,
diversity of styles began to coalesce into cohesive stylistic become less dened leaving a wider range of ideas for
groups. The best known group of American artists be- all artists.
came 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 opportu-
nity for learning and growing. Artists and teachers John
D. Graham and Hans Hofmann became important bridge
gures between the newly arrived European Modernists 3 Causation
and the younger American artists coming of age. Mark
Rothko, born in Russia, began with strongly surrealist im-
agery which later dissolved into his powerful color com- One socio-historical explanation that has been oered for
positions of the early 1950s. The expressionistic ges- the growing prevalence of the abstract in modern art an
ture and the act of painting itself, became of primary explanation linked to the name of Theodor W. Adorno
importance to Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and is that such abstraction is a response to, and a reection
Franz Kline. While during the 1940s Arshile Gorky's of, the growing abstraction of social relations in industrial
and Willem de Kooning's gurative work evolved into society.[35]
abstraction by the end of the decade. New York City be-
Frederic Jameson similarly sees modernist abstraction as
came the center, and artists worldwide gravitated towards
a function of the abstract power of money, equating all
it; from other places in America as well.[34]
things equally as exchange-values.[36] The social content
of abstract art is then precisely the abstract nature of so-
cial existence legal formalities, bureaucratic imperson-
alization, information/power in the world of late moder-
2 Abstraction in the 21st century nity. [37]
Francis Picabia,
1912, Tarentelle, oil on canvas, 73.6 x 92.1 cm,
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Reproduced
in Du Cubisme Joseph Csaky, Deux gures,
1920, relief, limestone, polychrome, 80 cm,
Krller-Mller Museum, Otterlo
Wassily Kandin-
sky, 1912, Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II),
oil on canvas, 47 3/8 x 55 1/4 in. (120.3 x 140.3
cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show Albert Gleizes, 1921, Composition
bleu et jaune (Composition jaune), oil on canvas,
200.5 x 110 cm
5 See also
Abstract expressionism
Abstraction in art
Action painting
Art periods
Asemic writing
Concrete art
De Stijl
Geometric abstraction
Hard-edge
Fernand Lger History of painting
1919, The Railway Crossing, oil on canvas, 53.8 x
64.8 cm, The Art Institute of Chicago Lyrical abstraction
Op Art
Representation (arts)
Spatialism
Western painting
In other media
Abstract animation
Abstract comics
Theo van Does-
burg, Neo-Plasticism: 1917, Composition VII (The Abstract photography
Three Graces)
Experimental lm
10 6 REFERENCES
[11] Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Art, Thames [30] Anna Moszynska, Abstract Art, p.104, Thames and Hud-
and Hudson son, 1990
[12] Hilton Kramer, Mondrian & mysticism: My long search [31] Anna Moszynska, Abstract Art, Thames and Hudson,
is over, ''New Criterion'', September 1995. Newcrite- 1990
rion.com. Retrieved 2012-02-26.
[32] Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolution-
[13] Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, Thames ary Russia and Beyond; Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori,
and Hudson,1977 Maria Mileeva; BRILL, Oct 24, 2013 Van Doesburg
stated that the purpose of art was to imbue man with those
[14] La Section d'or, 1912-1920-1925, Ccile Debray, positive spiritual qualities that were needed in order to over-
Franoise Lucbert, Muses de Chteauroux, Muse come the dominance of the physical and create the con-
Fabre, exhibition catalogue, ditions Cercle d'art, Paris, ditions for putting an end to wars. In an enthusiastic es-
2000 say on Wassily Kandinsky he had written about the dia-
logue between the artist and the viewer, and the role of
[15] Harrison and Wood, Art in theory, 19002000, Wiley- art as 'the educator of our inner life, the educator of our
Blackwell, 2003, p. 189. ISBN 978-0-631-22708- hearts and minds. Van Doesburg subsequently adopted the
3.books.google.com view that the spiritual in man is nurtured specically by ab-
stract art, which he later described as 'pure thought, which
[16] Francis Picabia, Caoutchouc, 1909, MNAM, Paris. does not signify a concept derived from natural phenom-
Francispicabia.org. Retrieved 2013-09-29. ena but which is contained in numbers, measures, relation-
ships, and abstract lines. In his response to Piet Mondrians
[17] Museum of Modern Art, New York, Francis Picabia, Composition 10, Van Doesburg linked peace and the spir-
''The Spring'', 1912. Moma.org. Retrieved 2013-09-29. itual to a non-representational work of art, asserting that
'it produces a most spiritual impressionthe impression of
[18] MoMA, New York, Francis Picabia, ''Dances at the
repose: the repose of the soul'.
Spring'', 1912. Moma.org. Retrieved 2013-09-29.
[33] Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus, Studio Vista, 1968
[19] National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC., Francis Pi-
cabia, The Procession, Seville, 1912. Nga.gov. Re- [34] Henry Geldzahler, New York Painting and Sculpture:
trieved 2013-09-29. 19401970, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, 1969
11
7 Sources
1. ^ Compton, Susan (1978). The World Backwards:
Russian Futurist Books 191216. The British Li-
brary. ISBN 0-7141-0396-9.
8 External links
The term Abstraction spoken about at Museum of
Modern Art by Nelson Goodman of Grove Art On-
line
9.2 Images
File:'Windows_Open_Simultaneously_(First_Part,_Third_Motif)'_by_Robert_Delaunay.JPG Source: https://upload.wikimedia.
org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/%27Windows_Open_Simultaneously_%28First_Part%2C_Third_Motif%29%27_by_Robert_Delaunay.
JPG License: Public domain Contributors: Tate Modern, London Original artist: Robert Delaunay
File:Albert_Gleizes,_1910-12,_Les_Arbres,_oil_on_canvas,_41_x_27_cm._Reproduced_in_Du_\char"0022\relax{}Cubisme,
_1912.jpg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7a/Albert_Gleizes%2C_1910-12%2C_Les_Arbres%2C_oil_on_
canvas%2C_41_x_27_cm._Reproduced_in_Du_%22Cubisme%22%2C_1912.jpg License: PD-US Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
File:Albert_Gleizes,_1921,_Composition_bleu_et_jaune_(Composition_jaune),_oil_on_canvas,_200.5_x_110_cm_DSC00547.
jpg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a2/Albert_Gleizes%2C_1921%2C_Composition_bleu_et_jaune_
%28Composition_jaune%29%2C_oil_on_canvas%2C_200.5_x_110_cm_DSC00547.jpg License: PD-US Contributors:
Albert Gleizes, Catalogue Raisonn, volume 1, Paris, SOMOGY ditions d'art/Fondation Albert Gleizes, 1998, ISBN 2-85056-286-6, no.
889, p. 299, Original artist:
Albert Gleizes
File:Arthur_Dove,_1911-12,_Based_on_Leaf_Forms_and_Spaces,_pastel_on_unidentified_support._Now_lost.jpg
Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Arthur_Dove%2C_1911-12%2C_Based_on_Leaf_Forms_and_
Spaces%2C_pastel_on_unidentified_support._Now_lost.jpg License: Public domain Contributors: http://www.amazon.com/
Spaces-Cubism-Abstract-Arthur-Expressionism/dp/B00AJYOPLM Original artist: Arthur Dove
File:Ballerina-icon.jpg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Ballerina-icon.jpg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0
Contributors:
Snowdance.jpg Original artist: Snowdance.jpg: Rick Dikeman
9.2 Images 13