ABSTRACT ART :

Abstract art is a general term for art that is far away from real life and does not express the surface
image of natural objects, but uses abstract colors, dots, lines and blocks to form art without concrete
objective images.

Abstract art, also called nonobjective art or nonrepresentational 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, colour, line, tone, and texture. Prior to the 20 th
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 colours assembled in a certain order,” summarizes the feeling
among the Symbolist and Post-Impressionist artists of his time.“

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 disfavour, 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.
Wassily Kandinsky (1866—1944)

• Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky is often credited with painting one of the first
purely abstract modern works. Kandinsky’s colourful, dynamic works are informed by a uniquely
spiritual interpretation of art making. His book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910) is regarded
as one the most influential art theories of the 20th century.
• Born in Moscow in 1866, he was raised in Odessa and studied at Grekov Odessa Art School
before attending law school. After a successful law career, Kandinsky moved to Munich in 1896,
at the age of 30, where he studied returned to painting.
• More so than many artists of the time, Kandinsky was influenced by music and spiritual
philosophy. Kandinsky read and espoused theosophy, a theory that posits creation as a
geometrical progression starting with a single point and continuing through a series of circles,
triangles and squares. Perhaps the most important painting of the early 1900s, Der Blaue Reiter
(The Blue Rider), 1903, shows a mysterious cloaked figure on horseback riding through a hilly
terrain as strange deep blue shadows are cast on the ground. During these years Kandinsky
began to emerge as an important art theorist.
• As his interest in theosophy grew, with its emphasis on the spiritual nature of geometric forms,
his works became more abstract and in 1910 he published his seminal Concerning the Spiritual
in Art, which advocated for abstract art as a means of achieving the spiritual. The book had far
reaching international impact.
• Though Kandinsky went back to Moscow in 1914, he returned to Germany in 1920, where he
taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 to the Nazi closure of the school in 1933 whereupon he moved
to France, which would remain his home until his death.
Piet Cornelies Mondrian

(1872—1944)

• Dutch painter. He loved to use straight lines and parallel lines to form a geometric picture to
express an absolute state. He opposed the use of any curves and advocated the beauty of right
angles, believing that through right angles we could observe the peace and harmony inside
everything. The color of his painting is simple and concise, and there is a very strict coordination
between the color block and the line.
• In 1907 Amsterdam sponsored the Quadrennial Exhibition, featuring such painters as Kees van
Dongen, Otto van Rees, and Jan Sluijters, who were Post-Impressionists using pure colours in
bold, nonliteral ways. Their work was strongly influenced by the forceful expression and use of
colour in the art of Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh, whose work had been featured in a
large exhibition in Amsterdam in 1905. Such daring use of colour was reflected in Mondrian’s
Red Cloud, a rapidly executed sketch from 1907. By the time he painted Woods near Oele in
1908, new values began to appear in his work, including a linear movement that was somewhat
reminiscent of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and a colour scheme—based on hues of
yellow, orange, blue, violet, and red—that was suggestive of the palette of contemporary
German Expressionist painters. With this vigorous painting of considerable size, Mondrian broke
away from the national tradition of Dutch painting.

• His new style was reinforced by his acquaintance with the Dutch artist Jan Toorop, who led the
Dutch Luminist movement, an offshoot of French Neo-Impressionism. The Luminists, like the
Neo-Impressionists, rendered light through a series of dots or short lines of primary colours.
Mondrian concentrated on this use of colour and limited his palette to the primary hues
• : he proved his mastery of this evocation of strong, radiant sunshine in paintings such as
Windmill in Sunlight (1908), executed mainly in yellow, red, and blue. But he moved beyond the
tenets of the movement and expressed visual concerns that would remain constant in his
oeuvre. In a painting such as The Red Tree, also dated from 1908, he expressed his own vision of
nature by creating a balance between the contrasting hues of red and blue and between the
violent movement of the tree and the blue sky, thus producing a sense of equilibrium, which
would remain his prevailing aim in representing nature. In 1909 Mondrian’s Luminist works
were exhibited in a large group show at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, which firmly
established him as part of the Dutch avant-garde.
 • That year was important for Mondrian’s career from another point of view: in May he joined the
Theosophical Society, a group that believed in a harmonious cosmos in which spirit and matter
are united. Inspired by these ideas, Mondrian began to free the objects depicted in his paintings
from naturalistic representation: these objects became formal components of the overall
harmony of his paintings, or, in other words, the material elements began to merge with the
overall spiritual message of his work. He concentrated on depicting large forms in nature, such
as the lighthouse in Westcapelle. In Evolution (1910–11), a triptych of three standing human
figures, the human figure and architectural subjects look surprisingly similar, thus stressing
Mondrian’s move toward a painting grounded more in forms and visual rhythms than in nature.
In 1910 Mondrian’s Luminist works attracted considerable attention at the St. Lucas Exhibition
in Amsterdam. The next year he submitted one of his more abstract paintings to the Salon des
Indépendants in Paris, his first bid for international recognition.

The Gray Tree 1912

• The Gray Tree exemplifies Mondrian’s early transition toward abstraction, and his application of
Cubist principles to represent the landscape.
• The three-dimensional tree has been reduced to lines and planes using a limited palette of grays
and black.
• This painting is one in a series of works Mondrian created, in which the early trees are
naturalistically represented, while the later works have become progressively more abstract. In
the later paintings, the lines of the tree are reduced until the form of the tree is barely
discernable and becomes secondary to the overall composition of vertical and horizontal lines.
• Here, there is still an allusion to the tree as it appears in nature, but one can already see
Mondrian’s interest in reducing the form to a structured organization of lines. This step was
invaluable to Mondrian’s development of his mature style of pure abstraction.
Pier and Ocean (Composition No. 10) 1915

• Pier and Ocean marks a definitive step in Mondrian’s path toward pure abstraction. Here he has
eliminated diagonal and curved lines as well as color; the only true reference to nature is found
within the title and the horizontal lines that allude to the horizon and the verticals that evoke
the pilings of the pier.
• The rhythms created by the alternating lines and their varying lengths presages Mondrian’s
mature dynamic, depicting an asymmetrical balance as well as the pulse of the ocean waves.
Reviewing this work, Theo van Doesburg wrote: “Spiritually, this work is more important than
the others. It conveys the impression of peace; the stillness of the soul.” Mondrian had begun to
translate what he saw as the underlying ordered patterns of nature into a pure abstract
language
Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray, and Blue 1921

• In the 1920s, Mondrian began to create the definitive abstract paintings for which he is best
known. He limited his palette to white, black, gray, and the three primary colors, with the
composition constructed from thick, black horizontal and vertical lines that delineated the
outlines of the various rectangles of color or reserve.
• The simplification of the pictorial elements was essential for Mondrian’s creation of a new
abstract art, distinct from Cubism and Futurism. The assorted blocks of color and lines of
differing width create rhythms that ebb and flow across the surface of the canvas, echoing the
varied rhythm of modern life.
• The composition is asymmetrical, as in all of his mature paintings, with one large dominant
block of color, here red, balanced by distribution of the smaller blocks of yellow, blue gray, and
white around it
• . This style has been quoted by many artists and designers in all aspects of culture since the
1920s.
Broadway Boogie-Woogie 1942

• This canvas presents the viewer with the culmination in Mondrian’s life-long pursuit of
conveying the order that underlies the natural world through purely abstract forms on a flat
picture plane.
• Broadening the use of his basic pictorial vocabulary of lines, squares and primary colors, the
black grid has been replaced by lines of color interspersed with blocks of solid color. This, and
his other late abstract paintings, show a new, revitalized energy that was directly inspired by the
vitality of New York City and the tempo of jazz music.
• The asymmetrical distribution of the brightly colored squares within the yellow lines echoes the
varied pace of life in the bustling metropolis, one can almost see the people hurrying down the
sidewalk as taxi cabs hustle from stop-light to stop-light. Broadway Boogie-Woogie not only
alludes to life within the city, but also heralds New York’s developing role as the new center of
modern art after World War II. Mondrian’s last complete painting demonstrates his continued
stylistic innovation while remaining true to his theories and format.
New York City I

New York City (1942) is a complex lattice of red, blue, and yellow lines, occasionally interlacing to create
a greater sense of depth than his previous works.
In October 2022, CNN quoted the Art Collection of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany as reporting that
the painting, titled “New York City No. 1,” may have been upside down since it was first exhibited in
1945, with sparse horizontal colored lines near the top of the frame, according to the collection’s
catalog. The lines near the bottom of the frame are denser. In a photograph taken for Mondrian’s
studio, however, the painting is positioned in the opposite direction: denser lines near the top of the
frame and sparse lines near the bottom.The staff of the collection tried hanging the painting upside
down and found that the visual effect was not only more striking but also more consistent with another
work in the series.The museum also speculated that Mondrian may have adjusted the orientation of the
canvas several times during the creation of the painting, so there is no right or wrong way to place the
painting. It can be interpreted in many directions, perhaps the “most revolutionary” feature of “New
York City One,” the collection’s catalog says.At a press conference on Oct. 27, 2022, Susan Myer-Beeser,
the curator of the collection, said that the orientation of “One New York City” would not be changed for
the time being because it could damage the painting, and that the confusion over whether it was upside
down was now a unique feature of the painting.

The person who said it was upside down is Suzanne, and she’s a scholar of contemporary art, the kind of
scholar who doesn’t talk to you about aesthetics, she doesn’t talk about it without proof, and she’s
based her reasoning on a photograph in Mondrian’s studio in 1944. On top of that, she thinks one piece
of tape stuck tighter, and the other piece of tape came off. These are the proofs