The Rise and Fall of Abstract Art
From utopian beginnings to the present day
When, in the late 19th century, artists began to move away from naturalistic representations of the world, a new idealism in art emerged.
Many artists, including Piet Mondrian, who painted Composition (№1) Gray-Red in 1935, believed that abstract art could be instrumental in a more harmonious society by communicating in a universal visual language. “Abstract art is not the creation of another reality, but the true vision of reality,” wrote Mondrian.
Another abstract painter, Wassily Kandinsky, had similarly utopian ambitions. He hoped that a new age of the spirit would arise, one that was more sensitive to the purely abstract forms of music and colour that he personally found so provoking. He believed his own era was too materialist — believing only in the existence of physical matter. Kandinsky saw a world beyond the material one. And abstract painting was, for him, the appropriate form of expression for this new, brighter era.
It is remarkable how widespread this sense of a new universal art was. The English abstract painter Ben Nicholson, wrote in 1941, “…every movement of human life is affected by form and colour, everything we see, touch, think and feel is linked up with it, so that when an artist can use these elements freely and…
