Abstraction-Création, association of international painters and sculptors that from 1931 to 1936 promoted the principles of pureabstraction in art.

The immediatepredecessor of the Abstraction-Création group was theCercle et Carré (“Circle and Square”) group, founded byMichel Seuphor andJoaquin Torres-Garcia in 1930. ArtistsGeorges Vantongerloo,Jean Hélion, andAuguste Herbin worked together to form a similar association, and by 1931 they managed to attract over 40 members to a group they called Abstraction-Création. That same year an annual periodical published by Hélion and Herbin,Abstraction-Création, debuted and took over the Cercle et Carré’s mailing list. The members whose work was represented in the first issue of the journal did not have a unified style, but rather they came from a variety of international movements that promoted formal purity and nonobjectivity: members Theo van Doesberg andPiet Mondrian were active inDe Stijl (“The Style”),László Moholy-Nagy came from theBauhaus, andRobert Delaunay practiced elements of lateCubism. While its central members leaned toward geometric abstraction, as a group Abstraction-Création advocated the general cause of abstraction and actively promoted it through its journal and regular exhibitions of its members’ work.

The looselyaffiliated association, which was centred inParis, eventually counted over 400 members, including international artists such asWassily Kandinsky, Naum Gabo,Josef Albers,Arshile Gorky, andBarbara Hepworth, most of whom lived in Paris for a time. The group’s last journal appeared in 1936. Abstraction-Création’sadvocacy of abstraction was taken up afterWorld War II by theSalon des Réalités Nouvelles (“Salon of New Realities”).