Abstract art applied in its strictest sense
to forms of 20th-century Western art that reject representation and have no
starting- or finishing-point in nature As distinct from processes of
abstraction from nature or from objects (a recurring tendency across many
cultures and periods that can be traced as far back as Palaeolithic cave
painting), abstract art as a conscious aesthetic based on assumptions of
self-sufficiency is a wholly modern phenomenon
Abstract art uses a visual language of
shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a
degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had
been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by
the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality.
The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed
alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. 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.
Abstract art, non-figurative art,
non-objective art, and nonrepresentational art are loosely related terms. They
are similar, but perhaps not of identical meaning.
Abstraction indicates a departure from
reality in depiction of imagery 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
likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for
instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be
partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to
anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely
to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total
abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational
(or realistic) art often contains partial abstraction.
Both geometric abstraction and lyrical
abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements
that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color is
conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which
blatantly alters the forms of the real life entities depicted.
Early Abstraction:
Much of the art of earlier cultures – signs
and marks on pottery, textiles, and inscriptions and paintings on rock – used
simple, geometric and linear forms which might have had a symbolic or
decorative purpose. It is at this level of visual meaning that abstract art
communicates. One can enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy or Islamic
calligraphy without being able to read it.
In Chinese painting, abstraction can be
traced to the Tang dynasty painter Wang Mo (王墨), who is credited to have invented the splashed-ink painting style.
While none of his paintings remain, this style is clearly seen in some Song
Dynasty Paintings. The Chan buddhist painter Liang Kai (梁楷, c.1140–1210) applied the style to figure
painting in his "Immortal in splashed ink" in which accurate
representation is sacrificed to enhance spontaneity linked to the non-rational
mind of the enlightened. A late Song painter named Yu Jian, adept to Tiantai
buddhism, created a series of splashed ink landscapes that eventually inspired
many Japanese zen painters. His paintings show heavily misty mountains in which
the shapes of the objects are barely visible and extremely simplified. This
type of painting was continued by Sesshu Toyo in his later years.
Another instance of abstraction in Chinese
painting is seen in Zhu Derun's "Cosmic
Circle Japan
Abstraction in romanticism period:
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.
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 by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.
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.
Abstraction in modern period:
Post Impressionism as practiced by Paul
Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne had an enormous
impact on 20th-century art and led to the advent of 20th-century abstraction.
The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was
essential for the development of modern art. 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 Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized
the Paris
Although Cubism ultimately depends upon
subject matter, it became, along with Fauvism, the art movement that directly
opened the door to abstraction in the 20th century. Pablo Picasso made his
first cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can
be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso dramatically created a new and radical
picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes,
violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new
Cubist inventions. Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear
manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practiced by Braque,
Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and others
into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of
different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large
variety of merged subject matter. The collage artists like Kurt Schwitters and
Man Ray and others taking the clue from Cubism were instrumental to the
development of the movement called Dada.
The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
published the Manifesto of Futurism in 1909, which later inspired artists such
as Carlo Carra in Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells and Umberto Boccioni
Train in Motion, 1911, to a further stage of abstraction that would, along with
Cubism, profoundly influenced art movements throughout Europe .
During the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or
the poet Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists including
Robert, 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 Hilma af Klint; Francis
Picabia painted Caoutchouc, 1909, The Spring, 1912, Dances at the Spring and
The Procession, Seville, 1912; Wassily Kandinsky painted Untitled (First
Abstract Watercolor), 1910, 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.
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
Abstraction 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 a 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
Impact:
Russian avant-garde:
Many of the abstract artists in Russia Russia France , Gabo went first to Berlin ,
then to England and finally
to America Moscow
The Bauhaus:
The Bauhaus at Weimar , Germany England Dessau Paris , London and America Switzerland
but many of the artists at the Bauhaus went to America
Abstraction in Paris
and London
During the 1930s Paris
became the host to artists from Russia ,
Germany , the Netherlands England Cornwall
During the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s
many artists fled Europe to the United
States New York
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 New York City Russia New York City became the center, and artists
worldwide gravitated towards it; from other places in America
Later developments:
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
Causation:
One socio-historical explanation that has
been offered for the growing prevalence of the abstract in modern art – an
explanation linked to the name of Theodor W. Adorno – is that such abstraction
is a response to, and a reflection of, the growing abstraction of social
relations in industrial society.
Frederic Jameson similarly sees modernist
abstraction as a function of the abstract power of money, equating all things
equally as exchange-values. The social content of abstract art is then
precisely the abstract nature of social existence – legal formalities,
bureaucratic impersonalization, information/power – in the world of late
modernity.
Post-Jungians by contrast 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.
From Wikipedia
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_art
