The History of Abstract Art
The meaning of non-representational painting through the 20th century
There was a point in time when abstract painting was supposed to be the culmination of art, where painting broke free of the bonds of representation and laid bare the underpinnings of all picture-making.
Early practitioners like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky felt they were accessing the raw syntax of painting, one that could reveal the balance of forces that govern human nature and the universe through the harmonisation of colour and form.
And yet in time abstract painting would lose this utopian primacy and be subsumed into the very list of genres that it was supposed to conquer — alongside still life, landscape and so on. Meanwhile, as the 20th century progressed, Conceptualism, Pop Art and many other developments in avant-garde art would progressively nudge abstraction towards the sidelines.
The Innovators of Abstraction
And yet abstraction survived and continues to enthral. What makes a “good” abstract painting is a question that reveals the complexities of the form and the fluctuations in its history.
The answer largely depends on your idea of what abstraction is for.
For one of the earliest abstract painters, the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, abstraction meant psychic communication with the spirit realm. Her fellow abstractionists like Kandinsky and Mondrian treated it as a language beyond words, a realm of visual exploration that might be compared to music for its power to transcend conventional communication.
Their work was spurred by the range of new developments in science that revealed forces invisible to the naked eye — including X-rays, infrared light and electromagnetic fields. Kandinsky at one point recorded his amazement at the discovery of radioactivity: “In my soul the decay of the atom was the same decay of the whole world.”
Much of the groundwork for abstraction had been laid by Cubism in Paris around 1907–08. The effect of the Cubist revolution, invented by Pablo Picasso and George Braque, was to add decisive impetus for the emerging interest in colour and shapes for their own intrinsic qualities.
Another Cubist painter, Jean Metzinger, attributed Picasso with the reinstatement of form, and said it had been “used for too many centuries as the inanimate support of colour [and] finally recovers its right to life and to instability.”
For the French painter Francis Picabia, who adopted an abstract mode of painting after dabbling in Impressionism, non-objective painting was a means by which the qualities of the modern, mechanistic world could be echoed. His abstract works built in the language of overlapping forms and fragmented angular planes that Cubism had made available and the Futurists would use for political ends. Motion was a central concern: Picabia painted dancers as well as the inner workings of machines.
War Interrupts
Had it not been for the First World War, then the immaterial and idealistic ambitions of abstract painters might have continued. Yet the war interrupted the story of abstraction decisively.
During these years, Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg wrote affirmatively that the war was “destroying the old world” and bringing about a “new consciousness” that abstraction would be apt for. (De Stijl: Manifesto 1)
For many however, by the time the war was over, abstract painting had lost its relevance. Abstract art was seen as painting about painting, and therefore lacked any substantial response to the atrocious conditions of the war. If the art of such 19th-century painters like Millet, Courbet, the Impressionists and Van Gogh sought — as John Berger pointed out — to “extend the area of experience to which painting might be open”, then abstract art was seen as narrowing it.
The Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, who initially saw abstraction as the means to dismantle art to its bare bones, to get to point “zero”, returned to realistic painting. Picasso left Cubism behind and turned to Neoclassicism and surrealism. Later, his Guernica would stand as the exemplar of the cacophony of responses that 20th-century war would prompt: using some of the languages of abstraction and Cubism, it was nonetheless politically conscious and adamant in its declaration. From this point, European art would continually fracture and diversify.
Meanwhile, for Picabia, canvas-based painting was no longer enough. He went abroad to New York and Switzerland, and became a leading figure in the international Dada movement with Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, producing images whose principal aim was to destabilise. In 1923, he wrote acerbically about the old paintings: “We should be equipped with a special eraser, gradually effacing our works and the memory of them.”
America Takes Over
Abstract Expressionism, which dominated American art in the 1940s and 50s, emerged as the new torchbearer for abstract painting. Chief among its cheerleaders was Clement Greenberg, through whose writings the purpose of abstraction was given new bearings.
What made a good abstract painting related to the new conceptual teleology now assigned to it: that of fulfilling its own inherent characteristics.
During the 1950s and 1960s, when the full possibilities and limits of abstract painting were being dramatically tested by artists like Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhart and Mark Rothko, Greenberg advocated a “self-critical” process by which artists interrogated their own methods.
Greenberg’s advocacy of modern American artists was based on the idea that they were fulfilling the historical purpose of painting, arguing that the hallmark of modern painting was the recognition of its own inherent properties, those of flatness (being painted onto a canvas) and of being made up of physical pigments of coloured paint. In one sense, Greenberg saw these as limiting factors. But when artists explored them explicitly — as he thought modern American painters did — then these physical and material limitations became productive and affirmative factors in their own right.
Barnett Newman perhaps captured it best when he said that painting representationally was anecdotal. He declared instead “My subject is antianecdotal”.
And yet if this intellectualisation of abstraction was supposed to secure its relevancy, then its effect was to instigate a dawn of new movements — including Conceptualism, Op Art and Minimalism — so that by 1969 the artist Joseph Kosuth could declare with some accuracy that “all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because it only exists conceptually”. (‘Art after Philosophy’, 1969)
Greenberg would join the chorus, asking “What is the ultimate source of value or quality in art? [The] answer appears to be: not skill, training, or anything else to do with execution or performance, but conception alone.”
(Clement Greenberg, from ‘After Abstract Expressionism’, 1962)
In different ways, Kosuth and Greenberg were making the same point, that what art had become since the advent of Modernism was overwhelmingly theoretical, based on concepts that worked to constantly cross-examine the traditional assumptions of art.
Abstract painting came to be seen in the same light: Pollock’s drip paintings for instance — where the artist laid out his canvases on the floor and sloshed them — were seen as proto-performance works in which physical gestures replaced the traditional brush-on-canvas methods.
Meanwhile, Mark Rothko whose colour field paintings were praised by Greenberg for their “openness”, by which he meant a dissolving of definite shape and form, had de‐materialised painting to the level of pure visual experience.
Rothko himself had a more romantic view of the creative process, being far less conceptual than the theorists would perhaps prefer. For Rothko, art was an imaginative adventure, a series of risks in opposition to common sense.
Writing in 1947, he claimed “The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous…”
Abstraction Today
The legacy of these historical strands leaves abstract art today in a unique position. Having passed through idealistic and conceptual phases, the “grand narrative” theory of abstract art has been dropped.
Instead, it has taken a self-conscious engagement with photography, film and performance — and more recently digital media, and an awareness of globalisation — to make abstraction relevant again.
It emerges now on the other side of postmodernism into the open field of contemporary art, where figurative and non-figurative can interplay in the pursuit of texture and effect, encompassing different methods of paint application, from blurring, scraping, squeezing and throwing — each method weighed down with numerous historical precedents.
In short, the very best abstract painters today have a faith in Rothko-like miracles and are aware of the innovations and changes that came before them.
Christopher P Jones is the author of What Great Artworks Say, an examination of some of art’s most enthralling images.
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