Abstract art is art that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead use shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect
Abstract art is art that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead use shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect
Abstract art has its origins in the 19th century. The period characterized by so vast a body of elaborately representational art produced for the sake of illustrating anecdote also produced a number of painters who examined the mechanism of light and visual perception. The period of Romanticism had put forward ideas about art that denied classicism’s emphasis on imitation and idealization and had instead stressed the role of imagination and of the unconscious as the essential creative factors. Gradually many painters of this period began to accept the new freedom and the new responsibilities implied in the coalescence of these attitudes. Maurice Denis’s statement of 1890, “It should be remembered that a picture—before being a war-horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort—is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order,” summarizes the feeling among the Symbolist and Postimpressionist artists of his time.
All the major movements of the first two decades of the 20th century, including Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, in some way emphasized the gap between art and natural appearances.
There is, however, a deep distinction between abstracting from appearances, even if to the point of unrecognizability, and making works of art out of forms not drawn from the visible world. During the four or five years preceding World War I, such artists as Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin turned to fundamentally abstract art. (Kandinsky is generally regarded as having been the first modern artist to paint purely abstract pictures containing no recognizable objects, in 1910–11.) The majority of even the progressive artists regarded the abandonment of every degree of representation with disfavour, however. During World War I the emergence of the de Stijl group in the Netherlands and of the Dada group in Zürich further widened the spectrum of abstract art.
Orphism (1912–13): Coined by the French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire. The name comes from the musician Orpheus in ancient Greek myths, as Apollinaire thought that painting should be like music. Main artists Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay also used the term simultanism to describe their work of this period.
Inspired by Freud’s idea of free association (the desire to reveal the unconscious mind), artists such as Joan Miro and Max Ernst created automatic paintings. This free way of creating art led to simplified organic shapes, which Miro developed into his own personal sign language.
Expressionism (early twentieth century): Expressionist artworks involved highly intense colour and non-naturalistic brushwork, often based on the artist’s inner feelings. Kandinsky saw his abstract paintings as an alternative pathway to spiritual reality.
Colour field painting (1940–1950s): Another form of abstract expressionism, the colour field painters produced simple compositions made out of large soft-edged areas of colour with no obvious focus of attention, with the aim of producing a meditational response in the viewer.
Action painting (1940–1950s): The action painter abstract expressionists were directly influenced by automatism. Pollock channelled this into producing gestural, improvised ‘drip paintings’ by placing his canvas on the ground and pouring paint onto it from the can or trailing it from the brush or a stick.
Op art (1960s): Seen as a subdivision of post-painterly abstraction this style of hard-edged geometric abstraction reacted to the more gestural forms of abstract expressionism by only using monochromatic fields of clean-edged colour which reinforced the flatness of the picture surface.
Post-painterly abstraction (1950s): This form of abstraction focused more than ever before on the basic elements of painting: form, colour, texture, scale, composition and were ruthless in their rejection of mysticism and of any reference to the external world.