Why Abstract Art Was Supposed to be the Pinnacle of Painting

The history, mysteries and realities of non-representational art

Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic) (1913) by Francis Picabia. Oil on canvas. 300.4 × 300.7 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, U.S. Image source

What is abstract art?

Eluding certainty, yet unmistakably perceptible. This is how I might describe abstract art.

Abstract paintings withdraw the usual representational or narrative cues we tend to rely on to read a painting. Subject matter is absent. As such, the viewer is often left to their own means of discovery, coalescing around the value they can bring through memory and speculation — the tools of their imagination.

What then can we make of images that are full of unforeseen spaces, unexplained contours, unresolved boundaries, ruptures, fragments and figments?

Reflecting on such absent narratives, the American painter Jackson Pollock once said, “There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.”

So what happens when art abandons everything we recognise?

The visual language of abstraction