Art with a degree of independence from visual references in the world
Robert Delaunay, 1912–13,Le Premier Disque, 134 cm (52.7 in.), private collection
Abstract art usesvisual language of shape, form, color and line to create acomposition which may exist with a degree of independence fromvisual references in the world.[1]Abstract art,non-figurative art,non-objective art, andnon-representational art are all closely related terms. They have similar, but perhaps not identical, meanings.
Western art had been, from theRenaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic ofperspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place intechnology,science andphilosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.[2]
Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction ofimagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is impossible. Artwork which takes liberties, e.g. altering color or form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. Ingeometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities.Figurative art and total abstraction are almostmutually exclusive. But figurative andrepresentational (orrealistic) art often contain partial abstraction.[citation needed]
Both geometric abstraction andlyrical abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerousart movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instancefauvism in which color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, andcubism, which alters the forms of the real-life entities depicted.[3][4]
Patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable of providing a livelihood for artists.[7][8] Threeart movements which contributed to the development of abstract art wereRomanticism,Impressionism andExpressionism. Artistic independence for artists was advanced during the 19th century. An objective interest in what is seen can be discerned from the paintings ofJohn Constable,J. M. W. Turner,Camille Corot and from them to the Impressionists who continued theplein air painting of theBarbizon school.Early intimations of a new art had been made byJames McNeill Whistler who, in his paintingNocturne 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 toImpressionism 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 likeEdvard Munch andJames Ensor drew influences principally from the work of thePost-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,[9] with modulated color in flat areas – became the basis of a new visual art, later to be developed intoCubism.
At the beginning of the 20th centuryHenri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubistGeorges Braque,André Derain,Raoul Dufy andJean Metzinger revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics calledFauvism. 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 tocube,sphere andcone became, along withFauvism, the art movement that directly opened the door to abstraction in the early 20th century.
František Kupka,Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors), 1912, oil on canvas, 210 × 200 cm, Narodni Galerie, Prague. Published inAu Salon d'Automne "Les Indépendants" 1912, Exhibited at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, Paris.
During the 1912 Salon de laSection d'Or, whereFrantišek Kupka exhibited his abstract paintingAmorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors) (1912), the poetGuillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists includingRobert Delaunay,Orphism.[12] 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."[13]
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 ofmodernism. Ideas were able to cross-fertilize by means of artist's books, exhibitions andmanifestos so that many sources were open to experimentation and discussion, and formed a basis for a diversity of modes of abstraction. The following extract fromThe World Backwards gives some impression of the inter-connectedness of culture at the time: "David Burliuk's knowledge ofmodern art movements must have been extremely up-to-date, for the secondKnave of Diamonds exhibition, held in January 1912 (in Moscow) included not only paintings sent from Munich, but some members of the GermanDie Brücke group, while from Paris came work byRobert Delaunay,Henri Matisse andFernand 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 almanacDer Blaue Reiter which had emerged from the printers while he was in Germany".[14]
From 1909 to 1913 many experimental works in the search for this 'pure art' had been created by a number of artists:Francis Picabia paintedCaoutchouc, c. 1909,[15]The Spring, 1912,[16]Dances at the Spring[17] andThe Procession, Seville, 1912;[18]Wassily Kandinsky paintedUntitled (First Abstract Watercolor), 1913,[19]Improvisation 21A, theImpression series, andPicture with a Circle (1911);[20]František Kupka had painted the Orphist works,Discs of Newton (Study forFugue in Two Colors), 1912[21] andAmorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs (Fugue in Two Colors), 1912;Robert Delaunay painted a series entitledSimultaneous Windows andFormes Circulaires, Soleil n°2 (1912–13);[22]Léopold Survage createdColored Rhythm (Study for the film), 1913;[23]Piet Mondrian, paintedTableau No. 1 andComposition No. 11, 1913.[24]
With his expressive use of color and his free and imaginative drawing Henri Matisse comes very close to pure abstraction inFrench Window at Collioure (1914),View of Notre-Dame (1914), andThe Yellow Curtain from 1915.
And the search continued: TheRayist (Luchizm) drawings ofNatalia Goncharova andMikhail Larionov, used lines like rays of light to make a construction.Kasimir Malevich completed his first entirely abstract work, theSuprematist,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 groupDe Stijl intended to reshape the environment of the future.
Many of the abstract artists in Russia becameConstructivists 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! wasVladimir 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 stoodKazimir Malevich,Anton Pevsner andNaum 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, includingWładysław Strzemiński,Katarzyna Kobro, andHenryk 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 theBauhaus. By the mid-1920s the revolutionary period (1917 to 1921) when artists had been free to experiment was over; and by the 1930s onlysocialist realism was allowed.[25]
As visual art becomes more abstract, it develops some characteristics of music[citation needed]: an art form which uses the abstract elements of sound and divisions of time.Wassily Kandinsky, himself an amateur musician,[26][27][28] was inspired by the possibility of marks and associative colorresounding in the soul. The idea had been put forward byCharles 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 hasThe spiritual dimension and can transcend 'every-day' experience, reaching a spiritual plane. TheTheosophical 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 thatPiet 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 ingeometry: the circle, square and triangle become the spatial elements in abstract art; they are, like color, fundamental systems underlying visible reality.
TheBauhaus at Weimar, Germany was founded in 1919 byWalter Gropius.[29] 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 theArts and Crafts movement in England and theDeutscher Werkbund. Among the teachers werePaul Klee,Wassily Kandinsky,Johannes Itten,Josef Albers,Anni Albers, andLászló Moholy-Nagy. In 1925 the school was moved to Dessau and, as theNazi party gained control in 1932, The Bauhaus was closed. In 1937 an exhibition ofdegenerate art, 'Entartete Kunst' contained all types ofavant-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.
During the 1930s Paris became the host to artists from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries affected by the rise oftotalitarianism.Sophie Tauber andJean Arp collaborated on paintings and sculpture using organic/geometric forms. The PolishKatarzyna 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 theCercle et Carré group organized byJoaquín Torres-García[30] assisted byMichel Seuphor[31] contained work by the Neo-Plasticists as well as abstractionists as varied as Kandinsky, Anton Pevsner andKurt Schwitters. Criticized byTheo van Doesburg to be too indefinite a collection he published the journalArt Concret setting out a manifesto defining an abstract art in which the line, color and surface only are the concrete reality.[32]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 internationalAbstract and Concrete exhibition was organized byNicolete Gray including work byPiet Mondrian,Joan Miró,Barbara Hepworth andBen Nicholson. Hepworth, Nicholson and Gabo moved to theSt. Ives in Cornwall to continue theirconstructivist work.[33]
A 1939–1942 oil on canvas painting byPiet Mondrian titledComposition No. 10. Responding to it, fellowDe Stijl artistTheo van Doesburg suggested a link between non-representational works of art and ideals of peace and spirituality.[34]
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, anddada were represented in New York:Marcel Duchamp,Fernand Léger,Piet Mondrian,Jacques Lipchitz,André Masson,Max Ernst, andAndré Breton, were just a few of the exiled Europeans who arrived in New York.[35] 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 paintingComposition 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 asGeorgia 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 theAbstract expressionists and theNew 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 teachersJohn D. Graham andHans 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. Theexpressionistic gesture and the act of painting itself, became of primary importance toJackson Pollock,Robert Motherwell, andFranz Kline. While during the 1940sArshile Gorky's andWillem 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.[36]
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One socio-historical explanation that has been offered for the growing prevalence of the abstract in modern art—an explanation linked to the name ofTheodor W. Adorno—is that such abstraction is a response to (and a reflection of) the growing abstraction of social relations inindustrial society.[37]
Frederic Jameson similarly sees modernist abstraction as a function of the abstract power of money, equating all things equally as exchange-values.[38] The social content of abstract art is then precisely the abstract nature of social existence—legal formalities, bureaucratic impersonalization, information/power—in the world oflate modernity.[39]
By contrast,Post-Jungians would see the quantum theories with their disintegration of conventional ideas of form and matter as underlying the divorce of the concrete and the abstract in modern art.[40]
ArtistAl Capp offered the simpler explanation that abstract art was "A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."[41]
Hilma af Klint,Svanen (The Swan), October 1914-March 1915, No. 17, Group IX, Series SUW (this abstract work was never exhibited during af Klint's lifetime)
^François Le Targat,Kandinsky, Twentieth Century masters series, Random House Incorporated, 1987, p. 7,ISBN0-8478-0810-6
^Susan B. Hirschfeld, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hilla von Rebay Foundation,Watercolors by Kandinsky at the Guggenheim Museum: a selection from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Hilla von Rebay Foundation, 1991. In 1871 the family moved to Odessa, where the young Kandinsky attended the Gymnasium and learned to play the cello and piano.
^Walter Gropius et al.,Bauhaus 1919–1928 Herbert Bayer ed., Museum of Modern Art, publ. Charles T Banford, Boston,1959
^Seuphor, Michel (1972).Geometric Abstraccion 1926-1949. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.
^Anna Moszynska,Abstract Art, p. 104, Thames and Hudson, 1990
^Anna Moszynska,Abstract Art, Thames and Hudson, 1990
^Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond; Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori, Maria Mileeva; BRILL, Oct 24, 2013 "Van Doesburg stated that the purpose of art was to imbue man with those positive spiritual qualities that were needed in order to overcome the dominance of the physical and create the conditions for putting an end to wars. In an enthusiastic essay on Wassily Kandinsky he had written about the dialogue between the artist and the viewer, and the role of art as 'the educator of our inner life, the educator of our hearts and minds'. Van Doesburg subsequently adopted the view that the spiritual in man is nurtured specifically by abstract art, which he later described as 'pure thought, which does not signify a concept derived from natural phenomena but which is contained in numbers, measures, relationships, and abstract lines'. In his response to Piet Mondrian'sComposition 10, Van Doesburg linked peace and the spiritual to a non-representational work of art, asserting that 'it produces a most spiritual impression...the impression of repose: the repose of the soul'."
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