Abstract art

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 in technology, science and philosophy.

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.

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.

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,[9] with modulated color in flat areas – became the basis of a new visual art, later to be developed into Cubism.

[11] 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.

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.

"[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 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.

[24] 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.

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.

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.

An exhibition by forty-six members of the Cercle et Carré group organized by Joaquín Torres-García[30] assisted by Michel Seuphor[31] contained work by the Neo-Plasticists as well as abstractionists as varied as Kandinsky, Anton Pevsner and Kurt Schwitters.

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.

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.

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.

[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] Artist Al Capp offered the simpler explanation that abstract art was "A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.