Abstract painting is often dismissed as something a child could do. The painters who invented it, between 1907 and 1926, had a reason for every shape. A canvas three meters wide that looks like pure chaos took more than thirty studies, and a plain black square was hung in the exact corner where Russian homes kept their icons.
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How These Were Chosen
An abstract painting shows no person, no place and no object. It is built from color, line and shape, and what it offers the eye is the arrangement itself: a red plane against a white one, a curve beside a straight edge.
In the early twentieth century, a few painters got there by two routes. Some simplified a real subject until almost nothing was left. Others started from geometry, squares, circles and straight lines, and never had a subject at all.
The twelve canvases chosen here date from 1907 to 1926, the years when this kind of painting was new and its rules were still being written. Some leave the subject behind completely. A few keep one hidden inside pure form.
12. Wassily Kandinsky, Several Circles (1926)
Colored discs of every size drift across the smoky, blackish blue of Several Circles, and nothing else shares the square canvas: no line, no triangle, no grid. The largest, a black disc near the top, is wrapped in a crescent of deep blue and a pale, uneven glow, while smaller circles in yellow, pink, orange, green and light blue scatter toward the corners.
Wassily Kandinsky painted it in January and February 1926. He was teaching at the time at the Bauhaus, the German school of art and design, then based in the town of Dessau. Through the 1920s he came back to the circle again and again, often placing it among straight lines and sharp angles. In Several Circles it stands alone.
Kandinsky explained the attraction in 1930. "The circle," he wrote, "is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium." Concentric describes rings that share one center, like a target. Eccentric means off center.
Several Circles puts both on the canvas. The green disc at the upper right carries a black dot in its exact middle, a target in miniature. The small discs gathered around the big black one sit off its center and spill over its edge, and where two of them cross, the overlap takes on a third color of its own.
At a Glance
Artist: Wassily Kandinsky (1866 to 1944)
Painted: January to February 1926
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 140.7 × 140.3 cm (55 3/8 × 55 1/4 in)
Where to see it: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
11. Theo van Doesburg, Counter Composition V (1924)
Counter Composition V is built around a large red square standing on one of its points, with triangles of yellow, blue, black, white and gray filling the corners around it. Theo van Doesburg painted it in 1924, seven years after he cofounded De Stijl, a Dutch circle of abstract artists. Yet the tilt of every plane on this canvas breaks a rule that De Stijl had made its own.