Abstract Art Prints

Abstract painting builds pictures from color, shape and line with little or no reference to visible things, breaking with the illusionistic perspective Western art had followed since the Renaissance. Abstraction runs from partial, where color or form is conspicuously altered as in Fauvism and Cubism, to total, where nothing recognizable remains. Its main currents are geometric abstraction, from Suprematism and Neo-Plasticism to hard-edge painting and Op art, and gestural or lyrical abstraction, from Kandinsky’s improvisations to Abstract Expressionism and color field painting. Related names include non-figurative, non-objective and non-representational art.

The way was prepared in the 19th century, as J. M. W. Turner and the Impressionists turned attention from objects to light and sensation. James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (Detroit Institute of Arts), a night sky of scattered sparks, provoked John Ruskin to accuse him of flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face, and Whistler won a farthing in damages at the 1878 libel trial. Paul Cézanne’s advice to treat nature through the cylinder, the sphere and the cone led to Cubism, while the free color of the Fauves fed directly into Kandinsky’s work. Theosophy and other spiritual teachings encouraged several pioneers to seek an inner reality behind appearances.

Several painters crossed into full abstraction almost at once. In Stockholm Hilma af Klint began her abstract Paintings for the Temple in 1906 but kept them from view; they became widely known only decades after her death. Wassily Kandinsky, an amateur cellist and pianist who likened colors to musical tones, published Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1911; his first abstract watercolor (Centre Pompidou, Paris) bears the date 1910 but was probably painted in 1913. In 1912 František Kupka showed Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors (National Gallery, Prague), and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the name Orphism for the art of Kupka, Robert Delaunay and others, a painting made of forms the artist invents rather than takes from sight.

In Russia Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov built Rayonist pictures from lines like beams of light, and Kazimir Malevich launched Suprematism with Black Square (1915, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), hung high in a corner like an icon at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd. After 1917 Vladimir Tatlin and the Constructivists demanded that art enter everyday life; Varvara Stepanova and Alexandra Exter left the easel for theater and graphic design, while Malevich, Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner defended art as a spiritual activity. Many of them emigrated, and by the 1930s Socialist Realism was the only style allowed.

In the Netherlands Piet Mondrian reduced painting between 1915 and 1919 to black horizontal and vertical lines enclosing rectangles of color, as in Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray (1921, Art Institute of Chicago); with Theo van Doesburg and the De Stijl group he called this Neo-Plasticism. In Germany the Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar in 1919 and moved to Dessau in 1925, employed Paul Klee, Kandinsky and Josef Albers until Nazi pressure closed it in the early 1930s. The 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition condemned the avant-garde, and Paris, home of the group Abstraction-Création from 1931, sheltered many artists before they moved on to London and New York.

By the early 1940s exiles such as Mondrian, Max Ernst and André Breton were living in New York, and teachers like Hans Hofmann linked them with younger Americans. The Abstract Expressionists of the New York School followed two tendencies. Jackson Pollock laid canvases on the floor and poured and dripped paint across them, as in Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art), and in 1952 the critic Harold Rosenberg named such work action painting; Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline also built pictures from the gesture itself. Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler instead spread broad fields of color, from the single vertical stripe of Newman’s Onement 1 (1948, Museum of Modern Art, New York) to Rothko’s softly hovering rectangles of the early 1950s.

From the late 1950s Frank Stella’s stripe paintings and Minimalism treated the picture as an object, hard-edge painters sharpened flat color and Op art set the eye vibrating, while Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly and Lee Krasner, in Rising Green (1972, Metropolitan Museum of Art), kept the free gesture alive. Before an abstract painting, look at how colors push and pull against each other, whether edges are crisp or dissolving, what the surface records of brush, knife or pour, and how scale works: many postwar canvases are meant to be seen close up, filling the field of vision.