- Also called:
- nonobjective art or nonrepresentational art
- Key People:
- El Lissitzky
- Robert Delaunay
- Theo van Doesburg
- Ad Reinhardt
- Related Topics:
- The arts
- abstract garden
Abstract art
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What is abstract art?
Abstract art is painting, sculpture, or graphic art where visible world portrayals play little to no part. It uses forms, colors, lines, tones, and textures. Abstract art, in its purest form, began in the 19th century.
Abstract Expressionism, an American school of abstract painting, emerged after World War II and had a broad influence. Abstract art became widely accepted in European and American painting and sculpture beginning in the 1950s.
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How is abstract art different from realistic art?
Abstract art diverges from realistic art by minimizing or eliminating the portrayal of recognizable objects from the visible world, emphasizing instead elements like form, color, and line. Realistic art, on the other hand, focuses on the accurate and detailed depiction of nature and contemporary life, closely observing outward appearances and rejecting imaginative idealization.
Realism seeks to represent subjects truthfully, often portraying the lives and appearances of ordinary people. Abstract art communicates through non-representational means, using shapes, colors, and textures to convey ideas, emotions, and visual sensations. While realism aims to mirror the external world, abstract art explores the creative process itself, or the relationships between formal elements, evoking physical and emotional reactions through illusions of space, movement, and light.
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What shapes, colors, or techniques do artists use in abstract art?
Abstract art uses forms, colors, lines, tones, and textures, where portraying things from the visible world plays little or no part. Visual sensations are communicated through lines, shapes, colors, and textures that hold no representational significance.
Shapes and masses include all areas of different color, tone, and texture, as well as individual and grouped images. Artists may use geometric symbols such as squares, circles, triangles, ovals, lozenges, and rectangles. Color can be the primary expressive element, with the main dimensions of color in painting being hue, tone, and intensity.
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Why do some artists choose to make abstract instead of realistic art?
Artists create abstract art for several reasons. In contrast to realistic art, abstract art doesn't try to depict subjects accurately. Instead, it communicates ideas, emotions, and sensations through elements like lines, shapes, colors, and textures, without representational significance.
The rise of modern art saw artists reject traditional forms to reflect changing social and intellectual conditions. Photography's emergence also freed artists from merely depicting the visual world. Abstract art allows exploration of the imagination and the aesthetic appeal of manipulating pigments, offering infinite possibilities.
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Who are some famous abstract artists?
Abstract art boasts many famous artists, each with a unique style. Wassily Kandinsky is considered one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. Kazimir Malevich founded Suprematism, emphasizing geometric elements over subject matter. Piet Mondrian was a major figure in the De Stijl movement, known for his use of straight lines, right angles, and primary colors. Other prominent abstract artists include Joan Miró, who combined abstract art with Surrealist fantasy, and Mark Rothko, known for his Color Field paintings that evoke introspection. Jackson Pollock is famous for his "drip and splash" method, which involved flinging paint onto the canvas.
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How has abstract art influenced modern art and design?
Abstract art significantly influenced modern art and design by challenging traditional representation and emphasizing the intrinsic qualities of the medium. Movements like Cubism and Abstract Expressionism paved the way for exploring elemental forms, colors, and lines, impacting painting, sculpture, and graphic arts.
This led to innovations such as the International Style in architecture, which favored geometric shapes and functional design, and the integration of art and technology, as seen in the Bauhaus movement. Abstract art's influence encouraged a focus on the essential elements of design, affecting typography, posters, and other visual communications.
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Abstract art, painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays little or no part. All art consists largely of elements that can be called abstract—elements of form, color, line, tone, and texture. Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe, illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization—and exposition dominated over expressive function.
Abstract art in its strictest sense has its origins in the 19th century. The period characterized by so vast a body of elaborately representational art produced for the sake of illustrating anecdote also produced a number of painters who examined the mechanism of light and visual perception. The period of Romanticism had put forward ideas about art that denied classicism’s emphasis on imitation and idealization and had instead stressed the role of imagination and of the unconscious as the essential creative factors. Gradually many painters of this period began to accept the new freedom and the new responsibilities implied in the coalescence of these attitudes. Maurice Denis’s statement of 1890, “It should be remembered that a picture—before being a war-horse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order,” summarizes the feeling among the Symbolist and Post-Impressionist artists of his time.
All the major movements of the first two decades of the 20th century, including Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, in some way emphasized the gap between art and natural appearances.
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There is, however, a deep distinction between abstracting from appearances, even if to the point of unrecognizability, and making works of art out of forms not drawn from the visible world. During the four or five years preceding World War I, such artists as Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin turned to fundamentally abstract art. (Kandinsky was traditionally regarded as having been the first modern artist to paint purely abstract pictures containing no recognizable objects, in 1910–11. That narrative, however, was later questioned, especially in the 21st century with the renewed interest in Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. She painted her first abstract work in 1906 but with a different goal than achieving pure abstraction.) The majority of even the progressive artists regarded the abandonment of every degree of representation with disfavor, however. During World War I the emergence of the de Stijl group in the Netherlands and of the Dada group in Zürich further widened the spectrum of abstract art.
Abstract art did not flourish between World Wars I and II. Beset by totalitarian politics and by art movements placing renewed emphasis on imagery, such as Surrealism and socially critical Realism, it received little notice. But after World War II an energetic American school of abstract painting called Abstract Expressionism emerged and had wide influence. Beginning in the 1950s abstract art was an accepted and widely practiced approach within European and American painting and sculpture. Abstract art puzzled and indeed confused many people, but for those who accepted its nonreferential language there is no doubt as to its value and achievements. See also modern art.