19th century in Europe ,
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1874),
Detroit Institute of Arts In 19th century Europe, patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable of providing a livelihood for artists. Three
art movements which contributed to the development of abstract art were
Romanticism,
Impressionism and
Expressionism. Artistic independence for artists was advanced during the 19th century. An objective interest in what is seen can be discerned from the paintings of
John Constable,
J. M. W. Turner,
Camille Corot and from them to the Impressionists who continued the
plein air painting of the
Barbizon school. Early intimations of a new art had been made by
James McNeill Whistler who, in his painting
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, (1872), placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than the depiction of objects. Even earlier than that, with her "spirit" drawings,
Georgiana Houghton's choice to work with abstract shapes correlate with the unnatural nature of her subject, in a time when abstraction was not yet a concept (she organized an exhibit in 1871).
Expressionist painters explored the bold use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations, and intense color. Expressionists produced emotionally charged paintings that were reactions to and perceptions of contemporary experience; and reactions to
Impressionism and other more conservative directions of late 19th-century painting. The Expressionists drastically changed the emphasis on subject matter in favor of the portrayal of psychological states of being. Although artists like
Edvard Munch and
James Ensor drew influences principally from the work of the
Post-Impressionists they were instrumental to the advent of abstraction in the 20th century.
Paul Cézanne had begun as an Impressionist but his aim – to make a logical construction of reality based on a view from a single point, with modulated color in flat areas – became the basis of a new visual art, later to be developed into
Cubism. Additionally in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe
mysticism and early
modernist religious philosophy as expressed by
theosophist Mme. Blavatsky had a profound impact on pioneer
geometric artists like
Hilma af Klint and
Wassily Kandinsky. The mystical teaching of
Georges Gurdjieff and
P.D. Ouspensky also had an important influence on the early formations of the geometric abstract styles of
Piet Mondrian and his colleagues in the early 20th century. The
spiritualism also inspired the abstract art of
Kasimir Malevich and
František Kupka.
Early 20th century Fauvism and Cubism , ,
Caoutchouc,
Centre Pompidou,
Musée national d'art moderne, Paris|left At the beginning of the 20th century
Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist
Georges Braque,
André Derain,
Raoul Dufy and
Jean Metzinger revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called
Fauvism. The raw language of color as developed by the Fauves directly influenced another pioneer of abstraction,
Wassily Kandinsky.
Cubism, based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to
cube,
sphere and
cone became, along with
Fauvism, the art movement that directly opened the door to abstraction in the early 20th century.
Early abstract art ,
Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (
Fugue in Two Colors), 1912, oil on canvas, 210 × 200 cm, Narodni Galerie, Prague. Published in ''Au Salon d'Automne "Les Indépendants"'' 1912, Exhibited at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, Paris. During the 1912 Salon de la
Section d'Or, where
František Kupka exhibited his abstract painting
Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (
Fugue in Two Colors) (1912), the poet
Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists including
Robert Delaunay,
Orphism. He defined it as, "the art of painting new structures out of elements that have not been borrowed from the visual sphere, but had been created entirely by the artist...it is a pure art." Since the turn of the century, cultural connections between artists of the major European 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 artist's 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 following extract from
The World Backwards gives some impression of the inter-connectedness of culture at the time: "
David Burliuk's knowledge of
modern art movements must have been extremely up-to-date, for the second
Knave of Diamonds exhibition, held in January 1912 (in Moscow) included not only paintings sent from Munich, but some members of the German
Die Brücke group, while from Paris came work by
Robert Delaunay,
Henri Matisse and
Fernand Léger, as well as Picasso. During the Spring David Burliuk gave two lectures on cubism and planned a polemical publication, which the Knave of Diamonds was to finance. 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 by a number of artists:
Francis Picabia painted
Caoutchouc, c. 1909,
The Spring, 1912,
Dances at the Spring and
The Procession, Seville, 1912;
Wassily Kandinsky painted
Untitled (First Abstract Watercolor), 1913,
Improvisation 21A, the
Impression series, and
Picture with a Circle (1911);
František Kupka had painted the Orphist works,
Discs of Newton (Study for
Fugue in Two Colors), 1912 and
Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (
Fugue in Two Colors), 1912;
Robert Delaunay painted a series entitled
Simultaneous Windows and
Formes Circulaires, Soleil n°2 (1912–13);
Léopold Survage created
Colored Rhythm (Study for the film), 1913;
Piet Mondrian, painted
Tableau No. 1 and
Composition No. 11, 1913. With his expressive use of color and his free and imaginative drawing, Henri Matisse comes very close to pure abstraction in
French Window at Collioure (1914),
View of Notre-Dame (1914), and
The Yellow Curtain from 1915. And the search continued: The
Rayist (Luchizm) drawings of
Natalia Goncharova and
Mikhail Larionov, used lines like rays of light to make a construction.
Kasimir Malevich completed his first entirely abstract work, the
Suprematist,
Black Square, in 1915. Another of the Suprematist group'
Liubov Popova, created the Architectonic Constructions and Spatial Force Constructions between 1916 and 1921.
Piet Mondrian was evolving his abstract language, of horizontal and vertical lines with rectangles of color, between 1915 and 1919,
Neo-Plasticism was the aesthetic which Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and other in the group
De Stijl intended to reshape the environment of the future.
Russian avant-garde ,
Black Square, 1923,
The Russian Museum Many of the abstract artists in Russia became
Constructivists believing that art was no longer something remote, but life itself. The artist must become a technician, learning to use the tools and materials of modern production.
Art into life! was
Vladimir Tatlin's slogan, and that of all the future Constructivists.
Varvara Stepanova and Alexandre Exter and others abandoned easel painting and diverted their energies to theatre design and graphic works. On the other side stood
Kazimir Malevich,
Anton Pevsner and
Naum Gabo. They argued that art was essentially a spiritual activity; to create the individual's place in the world, not to organize life in a practical, materialistic sense. During that time, representatives of the Russian avant-garde collaborated with other Eastern European Constructivist artists, including
Władysław Strzemiński,
Katarzyna Kobro, and
Henryk Stażewski. Many of those who were hostile to the materialist production idea of art left Russia. Anton Pevsner went to France, Gabo went first to Berlin, then to England and finally to America. Kandinsky studied in Moscow then left for the
Bauhaus. By the mid-1920s the revolutionary period (1917 to 1921) when artists had been free to experiment was over; and by the 1930s only
socialist realism was allowed.
Music As visual art becomes more abstract, it develops some characteristics of music: an art form which uses the abstract elements of sound and divisions of time.
Wassily Kandinsky, himself an amateur musician, was inspired by the possibility of marks and associative color
resounding in the soul. The idea had been put forward by
Charles Baudelaire, that all our senses respond to various stimuli but the senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level. Closely related to this, is the idea that art has
The spiritual dimension and can transcend 'every-day' experience, reaching a spiritual plane. The
Theosophical Society popularized the ancient wisdom of the sacred books of India and China in the early years of the century. It was in this context that
Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky,
Hilma af Klint and other artists working towards an 'objectless state' became interested in the occult as a way of creating an 'inner' object. The universal and timeless shapes found in
geometry: the circle, square and triangle become the spatial elements in abstract art; they are, like color, fundamental systems underlying visible reality.
The Bauhaus The
Bauhaus at Weimar, Germany was founded in 1919 by
Walter Gropius. The philosophy underlying the teaching program was unity of all the visual and plastic arts from architecture and painting to weaving and stained glass. This philosophy had grown from the ideas of the
Arts and Crafts movement in England and the
Deutscher Werkbund. Among the teachers were
Paul Klee,
Wassily Kandinsky,
Johannes Itten,
Josef Albers,
Anni Albers, and
László Moholy-Nagy. In 1925 the school was moved to Dessau and, as the
Nazi party gained control in 1932, The Bauhaus was closed. In 1937 an exhibition of
degenerate art, 'Entartete Kunst' contained all types of
avant-garde art disapproved of by the Nazi party. Then the exodus began: not just from the Bauhaus but from Europe in general; to Paris, London and America. Paul Klee went to Switzerland but many of the artists at the Bauhaus went to America.
Abstraction in Paris and London ,
Das Undbild, 1919,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart During the 1930s Paris became the host to artists from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries affected by the rise of
totalitarianism.
Sophie Tauber and
Jean Arp collaborated on paintings and sculpture using organic/geometric forms. The Polish
Katarzyna Kobro applied mathematically based ideas to sculpture. The many types of abstraction now in close proximity led to attempts by artists to analyse the various conceptual and aesthetic groupings. An exhibition by forty-six members of the
Cercle et Carré group organized by
Joaquín Torres-García assisted by
Michel Seuphor contained work by the Neo-Plasticists as well as abstractionists as varied as Kandinsky, Anton Pevsner and
Kurt Schwitters. Criticized by
Theo van Doesburg to be too indefinite a collection he published the journal
Art Concret setting out a manifesto defining an abstract art in which the line, color and surface only are the concrete reality.
Abstraction-Création founded in 1931 as a more open group, provided a point of reference for abstract artists, as the political situation worsened in 1935, and artists again regrouped, many in London. The first exhibition of British abstract art was held in England in 1935. The following year the more international
Abstract and Concrete exhibition was organized by
Nicolete Gray including work by
Piet Mondrian,
Joan Miró,
Barbara Hepworth and
Ben Nicholson. Hepworth, Nicholson and Gabo moved to the
St. Ives in Cornwall to continue their
constructivist work.
Late 20th century titled
Composition No. 10. Responding to it, fellow
De Stijl artist
Theo van Doesburg suggested a link between non-representational works of art and ideals of peace and spirituality. During the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s many artists fled Europe to the United States. By the early 1940s the main movements in modern art, expressionism, cubism, abstraction,
surrealism, and
dada were represented in New York:
Marcel Duchamp,
Fernand Léger,
Piet Mondrian,
Jacques Lipchitz,
André Masson,
Max Ernst, and
André Breton, were just a few of the exiled Europeans who arrived in New York. The rich cultural influences brought by the European artists were distilled and built upon by local New York painters. The climate of freedom in New York allowed all of these influences to flourish. The art galleries that primarily had focused on European art began to notice the local art community and the work of younger American artists who had begun to mature. Certain artists at this time became distinctly abstract in their mature work. During this period Piet Mondrian's painting
Composition No. 10, 1939–1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black grid lines clearly defined his radical but classical approach to the rectangle and abstract art in general. Some artists of the period defied categorization, such as
Georgia O'Keeffe who, while a modernist abstractionist, was a pure maverick in that she painted highly abstract forms while not joining any specific group of the period. Eventually American artists who were working in a great diversity of styles began to coalesce into cohesive stylistic groups. The best-known group of American artists became known as the
Abstract expressionists and the
New York School. In New York City there was an atmosphere which encouraged discussion and there was a new opportunity for learning and growing. Artists and teachers
John D. Graham and
Hans Hofmann became important bridge figures between the newly arrived European Modernists and the younger American artists coming of age.
Mark Rothko, born in Russia, began with strongly surrealist imagery which later dissolved into his powerful color compositions of the early 1950s. The
expressionistic gesture and the act of painting itself, became of primary importance to
Jackson Pollock,
Robert Motherwell, and
Franz Kline. While during the 1940s
Arshile Gorky's and
Willem de Kooning's figurative work evolved into abstraction by the end of the decade. New York City became the center, and artists worldwide gravitated towards it; from other places in America as well.
21st century Digital art,
hard-edge painting,
geometric abstraction,
minimalism,
lyrical abstraction, op art, abstract expressionism, color field painting,
monochrome painting,
assemblage, neo-Dada,
shaped canvas painting, are a few directions relating to abstraction in the second half of the 20th century. In the United States,
Art as Object as seen in the
Minimalist sculpture of
Donald Judd and the paintings of
Frank Stella are seen today as newer permutations. Other examples include
Lyrical Abstraction and the sensuous use of color seen in the work of painters as diverse as
Robert Motherwell,
Patrick Heron,
Kenneth Noland,
Sam Francis,
Cy Twombly,
Richard Diebenkorn,
Helen Frankenthaler,
Joan Mitchell, and
Veronica Ruiz de Velasco. == Analysis ==