Overview

For 40,000 years, art was about copying something (a bison, a king, a landscape). In the early 20th century, artists like Wassily Kandinsky asked: “Why?” Music doesn’t copy anything (a C-major chord doesn’t look like a tree), yet it makes us cry. Why can’t painting be like music? Why can’t it just be pure color and form, speaking directly to the soul?

Core Idea

The core idea is Non-Representation. Abstract art is not a picture of a cow. It is a picture of paint. It frees the viewer from the need to identify objects (“Is that a bird?”) and allows them to focus on the feelings evoked by the colors and shapes themselves.

Formal Definition

Art that does not attempt to represent external reality, but seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, forms, colors, and textures.

  • Semi-Abstract: You can sort of recognize the object (like Cubism).
  • Pure Abstraction (Non-Objective): No recognizable objects at all (like Mondrian).

Intuition

Listen to a sad song. There are no words, just minor chords. You feel sad. Now look at a painting with dark blues and jagged black lines. You feel sad. The painting is “visual music.” It bypasses the intellectual brain and hits the emotional brain.

Examples

  • Wassily Kandinsky: The pioneer. He claimed to have “discovered” abstraction when he saw one of his own paintings upside down and didn’t recognize the subject, only the beauty of the colors. He wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
  • Piet Mondrian: The grid guy. He reduced the whole universe to horizontal and vertical black lines and the three primary colors (red, yellow, blue). He believed this created a perfect, universal harmony.
  • Jackson Pollock: “Action Painting.” He dripped and splashed paint on the canvas. The art was the record of his physical movement. It was pure energy captured in paint.

Common Misconceptions

  • “My kid could do that”: It looks easy, but good abstraction requires a mastery of composition and color theory. If you move one line in a Mondrian, the whole thing feels “off.”
  • It has no meaning: It has too much meaning. It tries to express things that are too big for words—God, the Universe, the Soul, Angst.
  • Suprematism: Kazimir Malevich’s Russian movement. He painted a Black Square on a white background (1915). It was the “zero point” of painting. Pure feeling, no object.
  • Abstract Expressionism: The American movement (Pollock, Rothko) that put NYC on the map. It focused on the emotional expression of the artist.
  • Minimalism: The cool, geometric abstraction of the 1960s (Donald Judd). No emotion, just object.

Applications

  • Interior Design: Abstract art is popular in offices and hotels because it is “neutral”—it sets a mood without imposing a specific narrative.
  • Therapy: Art therapy often uses abstraction because it allows patients to express emotions they cannot verbalize.

Criticism / Limitations

  • Elitism: Because it doesn’t tell a story, many people find it baffling or alienating. It requires an “educated eye” to appreciate.
  • CIA Plot: During the Cold War, the CIA secretly promoted American Abstract Expressionism as a weapon against Soviet Realism, to show that the US was the land of “freedom” and “individualism.”

Further Reading

  • Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1911.
  • Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture. 1961. (The critic who championed abstraction).
  • Moszynska, Anna. Abstract Art. 1990.