Abstract art is a form of expression of artistic feelings that dispenses with all figuration and proposes a new reality different from the natural one. Use a visual language of shape, color, and line to create a composition that can exist independently of real-world visual references. It encompasses movements such as abstract expressionism, suprematism, action painting, De Stijl, or constructivism.
Early innovations in artistic approach are attributed to artists such as James McNeill Whistler. In his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (“Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket,” 1872), he emphasized visual wonder more than the representation of objects. Likewise, an objective interest in what is seen appears in paintings by John Constable, JMW Turner, Camille Corot, and most of the plen air painters of the Barbizon school.
Paul Cézanne had started as an Impressionist, but his logical reconstruction of reality from different spatial points, using color to create modules and planes, became the basis for new visual art that later developed Georges Braque’s Cubism and Pablo Picasso.
Expressionist painters explored the crude use of the pictorial surface, drawing distortions, exaggerations, and intense color. The Expressionists produced emotionally charged paintings that were reactions to and insights into contemporary experience; and responses to Impressionism and other more conservative directions in painting at the end of the 19th century. Although artists such as Edvard Munch and James Ensor were primarily influenced by the work of the Post- Impressionists, they were instrumental in the advent of abstraction in the 20th century with works such as The Scream and The Entry of Christ into Brussels.
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 such as Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was essential to the development of modern art. At the turn of the 20th century, Henri Matisse and other young artists, including the pre-Cubists Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, and Maurice de Vlaminck, revolutionized the Paris art world with colorful and expressive “wild” landscape and figure paintings, which critics called Fauvism. The crude color language developed by the Fauves directly influenced another pioneer of abstraction, Vasily Kandinsky.
Although Cubism ultimately depends on the theme represented, it was, together with favism, the artistic movement that directly opened the door to abstraction in the 20th century. Pablo Picasso made his first Cubist works of him based on Cézanne’s idea that every representation of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere, and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, of 1907, Picasso dramatically created a new and radical tableau depicting a crude, primitive brothel with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his new cubist creations. Analytical Cubism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from around 1908 to 1912. Analytical 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 innumerable artists around the twenties. Synthetic Cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé, and various objects joined together. Collage artists like Kurt Schwitters and Man Ray, and others influenced by Cubism were instrumental in developing the Dadaism movement.
Since the turn of the century, cultural connections between artists in major European and North American cities had become extremely active as they strove to create an art form that matched the lofty aspirations of modernism. Ideas could influence each other through artists’ books, exhibitions, and manifestos so that many sources were open to experimentation and formed the basis for the diversity of modes of abstraction. The following excerpt from The World Backwards, provides some impression of the interconnections of the culture of the time.
