Abstract art
Abstract art does away with recognizable subjects and lets form carry the meaning: color, line, shape and surface stand for themselves. It crystallized around 1910-1915, when painters on several fronts at once - Kandinsky in Munich, Hilma af Klint in Stockholm, Kupka and Delaunay in Paris, Malevich in Petrograd, Mondrian between Amsterdam and Paris - pushed representation out of the picture. For some, abstraction was spiritual, a language of inner necessity; for others, a cool inquiry into pure visual structure. After 1945 it became the default grammar of advanced art, splitting into geometric and gestural branches and absorbing everything from systems art to color field painting. No other development so thoroughly redrew what a painting is allowed to be: not a window onto the world, but an object that exists in its own right.
Defining characteristics
- Non-representational form: no recognizable subject, or subject dissolved into pure shape and color
- Line, color, scale and texture treated as the content of the work
- Emphasis on the flat picture surface rather than illusionistic depth
- Ranging poles of temperament: calculated geometry versus free, gestural improvisation
- Recurrent musical or spiritual ambitions - 'compositions', synesthesia, inner necessity
Key figures
- Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) — Credited with the first abstract watercolours; theorist of 'inner necessity'
- Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) — Created large abstract cycles from 1906, ahead of the recognized pioneers
- Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) — Founded Suprematism with Black Square (1915), painting's 'zero point'
- Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) — Reduced painting to horizontal-vertical grids and primary colors
- Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) — Orphist color-pure abstraction (Premier Disque)
Example works
- Black Square — Kazimir Malevich (1915)
- Premier Disque — Robert Delaunay (1913)
- Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow — Piet Mondrian (1930)
Sources
- Abstract art - Wikipedia encyclopedia