Abstract art is art that does not try to show a recognizable person, place or object. It works with color, shape, line and texture alone, and those elements become the subject of the picture.
Painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich made it known across Europe between about 1910 and 1920. After the Second World War, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko took it in new directions in New York.
The name describes what these painters did. "Abstract" goes back to the Latin abstrahere, "to draw away," and they drew away from the visible world.
Others had already loosened the tie between a picture and its model. In Paris, in the first years of the twentieth century, the painters nicknamed the Fauves, "wild beasts," used colors that nature never shows. Henri Matisse, the best known of them, painted his wife with a green stripe down her nose.
The Cubists, led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, went another way and broke objects into geometric facets. Yet both groups still started from something the eye could see: a face, a bottle, a landscape.
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Leaving the visible world behind sounds easy, as if a painter only had to stop painting things and let the brush wander. Composition VII, the Kandinsky canvas at the top of this page, suggests the opposite.
At first sight it is a crowd of colored patches and black lines that seem thrown down in one go. Yet he painted it in 1913 only after preparing it in more than thirty drawings, watercolors and smaller canvases.
A painting turned on its side
Kandinsky was Russian, and he came to abstraction slowly…
What You'll Discover
The Swedish painter who started years earlier.
How Mondrian turned a tree into lines.
Why a black square hung in a corner.
What changed when abstraction reached New York.
The chapel built for fourteen paintings.