Abstract Art

Abstract Art, a term applied to types of art in which elements such as forms, colours, and textures are used as expressive ends in themselves rather than to depict or evoke objects or scenes that correspond in some way with the world around us. In its broadest sense, the term can be applied to various art forms: for example, the phrase “Abstract Ballet” is sometimes used to describe a ballet that does not have a story but is concerned rather with “pure” choreography or with suggesting a general mood or idea. However, in normal usage the term “Abstract Art” is applied mainly to modern painting and sculpture that abandon the traditional idea that these arts are essentially concerned with the imitation of nature. This type of modern art first appeared in about 1910, but the attitudes that helped to create it can be traced back to the 19th century.

Many avant-garde artists and writers of the late 19th century emphasized the expressive and evocative qualities of colours, lines, and shapes, as distinct from their representative function. In 1890, for example, the French painter and art theorist Maurice Denis wrote: “Remember that a picture—before being a war horse or a nude woman or an anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.” In the same year, James McNeill Whistler expressed a similar point of view, saying: “As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject matter has nothing to do with the harmony of sound or of colour.” To stress the idea that painting, as well as music, could be concerned with abstract aesthetic qualities, Whistler often gave his own pictures pseudo-musical titles, such as “Symphony in White” or “Harmony in Blue and Silver”. Several other artists of the time used similar titles, including the Lithuanian M. K. Čiurlionis, who was a composer as well as a painter and typically called his pictures “Fugues” or “Sonatas”.

In the 1880s and 1890s the central figures of Post-Impressionism—Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh—all produced work that by emphasizing the subjective outlook of the creator helped to undermine the idea that a painting was a kind of window on the world or a mirror held up to reality. All three of them were immensely influential on early 20th-century art, and their ideas were taken further in the movements that revolutionized painting and sculpture in the decade before World War I—notably Expressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. These movements marked a decisive break with conventional ideas of naturalism, using colour to convey emotion rather than to reproduce the surface appearance of things (in Expressionism and Fauvism) or fragmenting and rearranging the forms of objects (in Cubism). They paved the way for Abstract Art, which—as the term is now understood—was born in about 1910, when a number of artists took the radical step of abandoning an external subject altogether.

No individual can be given the credit for producing the first completely non-representational picture or sculpture, for several artists were working towards similar ends more or less independently and more or less concurrently. Among the most notable pioneer abstract painters were the Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky (based in Germany at this time), the American Arthur Dove, the Czech-born František Kupka (active mainly in Paris), and the Swiss Augusto Giacometti (cousin of the famous sculptor Alberto Giacometti). In addition to producing some of the earliest abstract paintings, Kandinsky wrote an influential book in which he set forth his views on abstraction, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (“Concerning the Spiritual in Art”), which was published in 1911 (although it bears the date 1912).

As the title of the book suggests, Kandinsky did not think of Abstract Art as purely a matter of visual style. He thought that forms and colours could convey spiritual values, and that by relinquishing the depiction of the external world he could penetrate to a deeper level of meaning. Several other pioneer abstractionists shared with him this almost mystical attitude towards their work. However, this did not necessarily mean that they worked in similar styles. Kandinsky’s pictures are typically free-flowing and richly coloured, whereas those of his equally idealistic Dutch contemporary Piet Mondrian are severely geometrical and use a restricted range of flat colours.

A number of artists who had similar views to Mondrian joined with him in founding a group called De Stijl (The Style), which functioned from 1917 to 1931. This was one of several notable groups or movements that flourished in the first decade of abstraction. Among them were Orphism and Synchromism in France, and Constructivism and Suprematism in Russia. In England, several of the artists known as Vorticists produced pure abstract pictures at this time, although others retained some figurative references in their work, which can be described as semi-abstract. Among the great independent abstract artists of the same period—owing allegiance to no group—was the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, born in Romania but active in Paris for most of his career. His work exemplifies a type of abstraction in which almost completely abstract forms are arrived at by simplifying the shapes of the natural world to an elemental purity.

Although Abstract Art was supported from the beginning by certain critics, dealers, and collectors, it initially made little impact on the general public, being regarded by many people as an incomprehensible joke. Like other forms of modern art, it was banned in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the 1930s, and the main centre for abstraction at this time was Paris (which became the home of many refugee artists from Germany, Russia, and elsewhere). A society called Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) was founded there in 1929 to promote Abstract Art, and in 1930 it staged an exhibition in which all the works on show were abstract—the first of its kind ever held. In 1931 Cercle et Carré was superseded by a larger organization called Abstraction-Création, which grew to have about 400 members. They included not only artists who were resident in Paris, but also visitors to the city, including Barbara Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson, who were among the leading pioneers of Abstract Art in Britain.

After World War II, abstraction became a much more powerful force in modern art than it had ever been before. This was largely because of the success of Abstract Expressionism, which was the most important movement in American painting in the late 1940s and the 1950s—a period when the United States was for the first time recognized as the world leader in contemporary art. Many European artists had emigrated to the United States during the war and they contributed to the vitality of the art scene in New York, which replaced Paris as the prime centre for contemporary painting and sculpture. The ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism was aided by political factors: in addition to its aesthetic qualities, it was invested with patriotic values (it was sometimes known by the alternative name of “American-Type Painting”), for its emphasis on freedom of expression contrasted with the repression of individuality that had driven so many artists from totalitarian countries, particularly Nazi Germany.

In Europe, especially France, a type of free, improvisatory abstraction (sometimes called Tachisme) developed as a parallel to Abstract Expressionism. This, too, enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success, and for a period around 1960 abstraction could be regarded as the central—almost orthodox—strand in contemporary art throughout most of the Western world. Later in the 1960s, there was a reaction against this dominance, expressed as a revival of figurative art, but abstraction has continued to flourish and to develop new forms, for example Op Art and Minimal Art, which had their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. The precision of Op Art and the cool impersonality of Minimal Art marked a kind of backlash against the subjectivity and emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism.

Other major tendencies in post-war abstraction include Kinetic Art (which began earlier but first became a recognized movement in the 1950s) and the use of industrial materials and scrap metal in sculpture. The latter tendency is exemplified in the work of Sir Anthony Caro, who was an influential teacher at St Martin’s School of Art in London from 1953 to 1979, inspiring numerous young British sculptors to work in his idiom. Sometimes Abstract Art has merged with other modes of expression, for example Land Art and Conceptual Art.