Major Artistic Movements - Abstract Art and its influences
Abstract art has its earliest roots in primary human civilisation. Cultures across the globe have used non-figurative, highly symbolic art for centuries. Abstract art is art that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead uses shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect. The term can be applied to art that is based on object, figure or landscape, where forms have been simplified or schematised to create an abstracted version of it.
The term is also applied to art that uses forms, such as
geometric shapes or gestural marks, which have no source at all in an external
visual reality. Some artists of this ‘pure’ abstraction have preferred terms
such as concrete art or non-objective art, but in practice the word abstract is
used across the board and the distinction between the two is not always
obvious.
While abstract art became a dominant art form in the 20th
century, it evolved from embryonic roots in the 19th Century, with artists like
Turner, Whistler and Cezanne.
Steps toward abstraction can be seen in the paintings below,
which could be seen as precursors to the 20th century's main abstract movement.
JMW Turner, Rain, Steam & Speed, The Great Western Railway, 1844
James McNeill Whistler, The Falling Rocket Nocturne in Black and Gold, 1875
Paul Cezanne, The Ginger Jar, 1895
20th Century progressions
There was a marked progression towards abstraction in the
work of both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque from 1907 onwards. While the
subject is clear in Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, both artists
pushed at the boundaries of representation in subsequent paintings. In Braque’s
Still Life with a Violin, 1910, recognisable elements are reduced to geometric
shapes and dispersed across the surface of the canvas. Critic Louis Vauxcelles referred
to Braque’s painted forms as ‘cubes’ and hence the term Cubism was coined.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
Georges Braque, Still Life with Violin, 1913
Henri Matisse, The Red Studio,1911,
Matisse's innovative use of colour also broke with
traditional representation, but in a different way. It showed less how he saw
the real world and more how he felt about it. In The Red Studio he
rejected naturalistic colour, filling the entire canvas with a saturated red. This
flattens the composition and makes the objects appear to be floating in space.
Mark Rothko was reportedly moved to tears by this painting when he saw it in
New York in 1949.
Extrapersonal Influences
Abstract art of the 20th century unlike its
precursory influences can at times be extrinsic and emanating from a source of
inspiration outside of the artist or indeed, deep inside the
artist. Spiritual movements were of great influence, particularly in the mid to
late 19th century, and direct messages from other realms were
interpreted into paintings. Paintings became portals to other worlds and
dimensions. The inspiration lay beyond the immediate consciousness of the
artist. Piet Mondrian, Georgiana Houghton and Hilma af Klint were exponents of
this method.
Initially, the work of Georgiana Houghton, who is arguably
the true earliest practitioner of the abstract genre, went unacknowledged as
leading the abstract movement, and instead that accolade went to Wassily
Kandinsky in the history books. Many still believe he is the pioneer of the
abstract movement, which is not the case. During her lifetime, Houghton was seen
more as a medium who painted, as opposed to a true artist, despite exhibiting
during her lifetime to mixed reviews.
Georgiana Houghton, The Eye of God, 1862
Hilma af Klint
After Houghton came Hilma af Klint, who some have said could
be the pioneer of the movement, but this forgets and omits the work of Houghton
in the preceding years. Af Klint again produced work inspired by spirit, and
perhaps again, this could be a reason why it was not included as part of the
movement.
Hilma af Klint, Untitled #1, 1915
Af Klint was interested in practices such as Spiritualism
and Theosophy, a philosophy which sought direct knowledge of God, founded by
Helena Blavatsky and inspired by eastern religion and science.
This spiritual interest led Af Klint to experiment with both
automatic drawing and geometric abstraction before other artists. Her work used
symbols and diagrams, which she claimed were communicated directly by spirits. She
saw them as diagrams based upon Theosophical ideas and therefore, did not consider
her paintings to be abstract art but instead, messages from other realms.
Her paintings were
not exhibited in her lifetime and she requested in her will that none be shown
until 20 years after her death. She produced 23,000 pages of notes detailing
what spirit told her to paint.
Af Klint's Sketchbook
Sonia Delaunay
Sonia Delaunay invented a whole new way of breaking down art
into colour and form. Complementary colours cause an optical vibration and
Delaunay exploited this to serve her own role of showing the painterly
evocation of the emotional lift of light.
Form = arrangement or structure and also the
individual elements that the structure is comprised of.
Colour = light. Delaunay’s abstract rule was to
create light by scientific laws.
Science also fed ideas into abstraction on the basis that abstract
art could be a cosmic vision of everything; psychology, science, or theology. Married
to Robert Delaunay, they drew their radiating circles of colour from the glow
around electric lights which provided the initial inspiration, writing a book /Manifesto
called ‘Light’.
Sonia Delaunay, The Athenaeum, Electric Prisms, 1914
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky famously experienced an epiphany on seeing
a painting of haystacks by Monet in 1896. He did not recognise the subject but
was moved by the arrangement of colours which led him to the conclusion that
colour and form alone could have a powerful effect. Kandinsky had a condition
called synaesthesia, a confusion of the senses which allowed him to see colours
when listening to music. Like music, his abstract paintings tried to express
emotional and spiritual truths; “The artist’s sensitivity, feelings and
memories are full of nature’s impressions that can be translated to canvas in
an abstracted way”. Until 1986 Kandinsky was allegedly credited as the first
abstract painter and he primarily found his inspiration in music
Kandinsky translated other art forms into paint, he was
heavily influenced by music and sought to show what he heard as colour, line and
form. The abstract expressionists sought to release emotion onto canvas and
again to excavate the inner world and bring it forth to the physical world. As
artists often tend to be led by emotion and creativity this makes sense to a
large degree. Artists will always seek to bring something of themselves to the
canvas.
He likened working with colour to playing the piano. “Colour
is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers and the soul is the piano with its
many strings. The artist is the hand that plays touching one key and then
another key in order to make the soul vibrate”.
His artistic theory was that the materials of painting,
colour, shape, line could be manipulated to affect the soul. He drew lines in
black paint – he worked intuitively and instinctively. He then filled in areas
in colour.
Rudolf Steiner (one of Madame Blavatsky’s followers) built a
meditation centre. Kandinsky read Steiner’s theories and was drawn to his
proposal that we all inhabit several bodies – one of which (the astral body) is
invisible. He attended his lectures in 1908 ‘How to Know Higher Worlds’.
Kandinsky himself wrote a book called ‘On the Spiritual in Art’.
He was inspired by primitive art that he felt understood the
essence of the spiritual. He also felt that music profoundly affects us but it
doesn’t represent anything – art could be like music in that
regard. Before abstraction, his paintings were glowing landscapes
‘Bavarian Landscape with a Church’ and ‘Lake Starnberg’, 1908 for example.
Wassily Kandinsky, Painting with Black Arch, 1912
Kazimir Malevich
Kandinsky was not alone in his quest for an inner truth.
Influenced first by Cubism, then by the Italian Futurists, the Russian artist
Kazimir Malevich developed a new approach in 1915 which he called Suprematism
(Supreme over reality). “The objects that make up this world are not reality,
they might call forth feeling but feeling separated from reality is the true
reality”.
It is only by abstracting objects that we can get to reality
as we interrogate their essence. The ‘fourth dimension’ = time warped by space.
Ordinary existence warps into higher existence in the fourth dimension.
Abstraction soaring into the beyond. Suprematists saw form as feeling.
Suprematism eventually gave way to Constructivism.
Malevich’s first works of pure geometric abstraction, which he created in secret, were exhibited in December 1915. Arguably the most famous abstract painting in history, he called his famous Black Square the ‘zero of form’, the beginning of a new, non-objective reality.
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915
Kazimir Malevich, Cow and Violin, 1913
Paul Klee
Klee’s rule was always to observe nature and to achieve this
he used tonally graded colour. His use of colour had been shaped by his experience
of the landscape, architecture and quality of light during a trip to Tunisia in
1914. He painted his first abstract composition upon his return and produced a
lot of watercolours after a watershed trip to Morocco.
Klee taught at The Bauhaus art school in Germany where the
ethos was to reconcile mass production and the creative spirit. Klee joined the
teaching staff in 1921, and told his students, ” Pay attention to the infinite
subtlety of the tonal shades in nature”. His great friend Kandinsky followed
him there in 1922.
Paul Klee, Ancient Sound, 1925.
Paul Klee, Ab Ovo, 1917
Paul Klee, With the Mountain Range, 1919
Piet Mondrian
Like Af Klint, Mondrian was another artist heavily
influenced by the teachings and practices of Theosophy. This is probably
unsurprising as the abstract art movement coincided with the peak of
Theosophy’s popularity.
When Piet Mondrian arrived in Paris in 1911, he was nearly 40 years old and had been working in a style influenced by his interest in Theosophy for some time. The influence of Cubism shifted his focus radically towards abstraction. In 1917, Mondrian painted his first purely abstract work, ‘Composition in Line’, and by 1919 had fully developed into an abstract visual language, Neo-Plasticism. This featured horizontal and vertical black lines, punctuated by areas of white and occasional blocks of primary colour. His main rule was to use very few colours and very minimal compositions using mainly primaries and monochrome.
Piet Mondrian, Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red, 1938
The influence of 1920’s Surrealism
Geometric abstraction was not the only development of the
20th Century. Influenced by abstract developments into non-figurative art, in
1920s Paris a group of artists called the Surrealists began to experiment with
ideas of chance to unlock their subconscious minds. One method they used was
automatic drawing, where the artist would suppress conscious thought and
produce an image which was the direct expression of their ‘unconscious’ thoughts.
Joan Miró used this technique in a number of paintings he made between 1925 and
1927.
Joan Miro
'Painting' is a large landscape in oil and tempura on
canvas, dominated by a highly saturated cerulean blue ground. 'Painting' is one
of a large series of works made by Miró between 1924 and 1927, often referred
to as ‘automatic paintings’ or ‘dream paintings’ and also as ‘peinture-poesie’
(poetry-painting). With their fields of colour animated by semi-abstract
symbols, they represented a marked departure from the figurative style of
Miró’s earlier work.
In the 1920s, Miró became associated with avant-garde
figures in art and literature, including members of the emerging surrealist
movement who were interested in using art to reveal the secrets of the subconscious
mind. In his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton famously advocated the
practice of ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’. Miró often described his
working method as highly spontaneous and as being ‘led by the brush’ and he
also painted in altered states such as hunger-induced hallucinations. However,
he also took a planned approach to his work by using both notebooks and
sketchbooks. Miró explained in 1948 that ‘for me a form is never something
abstract; it is always a sign of something’. He spanned genres across abstract,
abstract expressionism, symbolism and to some degree, surrealism.
Joan Miro, Painting, 1927
Liubov Popova
Popova, who studied under Malevich, was one of the main
figures in the Constructivist group alongside Alexander Rodchenko. These Soviet
artists were interested in how abstract art and design could be applied to the
cause of revolution. From typography to textile design, architecture, painting
and sculpture, their vision was of an art of the everyday, constructed for the good
of society. Some even said what they were doing was not art, it was the process
of overcoming art.
Abstraction strips everything down to form but form can be
radically different from instance to instance. Form was not feeling for the
Constructivists – form was useful.
Liubov Popova, Composition in Red Black and Gold, 1920
Mark Rothko
Klee’s colour harmonies would seem to have echoes in the
large scale canvases of Mark Rothko. These feature soft-edged blocks of colour
arranged against a saturated background. Despite being influenced by the work
of Matisse and early abstract artists such as Klee, Rothko rejected the idea
that he was an abstract artist, saying, “I'm not interested in the relationship
of colour or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic
human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.” Rothko lived an isolated
existence and found the suddenness of his success overwhelming.
Influenced by Nietzsche, Greek mythology, and his
Russian-Jewish heritage, Rothko's art was profoundly imbued with emotional
content that he articulated through a range of styles that evolved from
figurative to abstract. His early figurative work included landscapes, still
life, figure studies, and portraits and demonstrated an ability to blend Expressionism
and Surrealism. His search for new forms of expression led to his Colour Field
paintings, which employed shimmering colour to convey a sense of spirituality.
He utilised active, expressive surfaces with diffused grey
over other colours to almost make it ‘misty’ such as Red on Maroon. Merging,
flowing passages. Looming darkness alive with energy. When one thinks of Rothko
one thinks of brooding depth.
Mark Rothko, Red on Maroon, 1959
Jackson Pollock
Like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock’s art aimed to provoke a
strong emotional response from the viewer. An alcoholic who attended Jungian
therapy, he took his drawings to the sessions. He said he was painting the
‘aims of the age’ and didn’t need to paint nature because he was nature.
Pollock experimented with a number of styles before
eventually developing a vigorously gestural technique, dripping and spattering
very liquid paint across his canvases in a seemingly random way. However, he
arrived at his conclusions, he ended up with a tightly controlled rhythmic
structure – even though the paintings look deceptively loose, there are always
rules.
Away from his distinctive, iconic paintings he also produced
drawings (primal, symbolic doodlings) like the one below which he would have
taken to his therapy sessions. Convergence (below) is more typical of his
best-known style.
Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1939–40
Jackson Pollock, Convergence, 1952
Albert Irvin was a prolific British artist, best known for
his exuberant paintings, watercolours, screenprints and gouaches. Born in
London, he continued to live and work there throughout his life. His art
focused on capturing and exploring the experience of being in the world. He
started with sombre colours as he thought at that time that painting had to be
serious. He lightened up considerably as he went along through his career.
In the early 1940s, he attended the Northampton School of Art but had to cut short his studies when he joined the Royal Air Force in 1941 to serve as a navigator in World War II. After the war Irvin returned to his passion for art, enrolling in 1946 at Goldsmiths College in London. He graduated four years later with a National Diploma in Design. Irvin went back, as a teacher, to Goldsmiths in 1962 remaining there for over twenty years.
Albert Irvin, Northcote, 1989
Contemporary Abstract Artists
Fiona Rae
Fiona Rae (British, b.1963) is an abstract painter whose
bright colours and hypnotic designs form her distinctive style. In 1988 she was
one of the artists exhibited in Freeze, curated by Damien Hirst. The Freeze
show started the Young British Artists (YBAs), and Rae became a prominent
member of the group.
Her work is held by many art institutions worldwide such as
the Royal Academy of Arts, the Tate Modern in London, and the Corcoran Gallery
of Art in Washington, D.C. Rae currently lives and works in London where she is
professor of painting at the Royal Academy of Arts.
She describes her process as quite hesitant; varying her
brush sizes so as not to repeat lines over the substrate. She aims to make the
whole painting the experience rather than deliberately lead the eye, believing marks
can stand alone.
Fiona Rae, As I run and run, happiness comes closer, 2008
Fiona Rae, I need gentle conversations, 2012
Dan Perfect
Dan Perfect (b.1965) is a British painter who specialises in
creating imagined universes filled with bright colours, architectural or
distorted forms, and fragments of comic characters all blended together.
Perfect has a distinct view on creating a piece of art,
seeing it more as a performance than the rendering of what is in his head. He
makes the most of every moment of the three months it takes him to create a piece
before delivering it to the public. Perfect normally paints with a mixture of
oils and acrylics, but he has been known to draw. His work is categorised as
Contemporary Abstract, though some have added the adjective ‘manic’ to his
work.
Perfect’s process is more about ‘controlled freedom in
processed stages’. He starts with a plan and improvises via drawing, often
scaling these up onto large canvasses (always working flat to avoid the effects
of gravity and drips). He then draws in paint with expressive marks, initially
using a large brush and quite liquid black paint. A lot of the first stage is
obscured by later stages when colour is applied.
The level of detail in his paintings has astounded many
viewers and completely changed the perception of pieces inspected more closely.
Some of his paintings appear to be coming directly from beneath a microscope,
with representations of minuscule life forms appearing to float through the
image.
Some of his notable works include Antelope Canyon, Brujo,
and Hung Out, all from 2005. The artist describes his 2007 work, appropriately
titled Uproar, as a re-imagination of the world.
Dan Perfect, Bestiary, 2012
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