abstract essay about art

Abstract Art Essay Example

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When most people criticize abstract art they are usually criticizing non-representational abstraction. Or, in other words, abstract art that doesn’t represent something you could see in real life. One criticism of abstract art is that it's often seen as random. Abstract art's nonrepresentational nature and inherent lack of symbolism allow for a wider range of potential meaning. If you take a painting with a cross in it, you are immediately associating that with religion or faith somehow. It’s hard to interpret it as, “oh this represents the taste of mint ice cream on a hot summer day.” This is related to another criticism of abstract art: you could apply any meaning to it; imagine a famous art critic approaching a non-objective abstract piece coming up with some grand, intricate meaning behind the artwork. Examining the colors, the brushstrokes, the thickness of the paint. Only for the artist to say, “Yes, that’s exactly it! I definitely meant that, so much meaning behind this purposeful piece of art.”

This is what it comes down to, purpose. The value of abstract art is equal to the intention and purpose of its creation. If it wasn’t then would’ve every artist’s pallet be valuable abstract art? If you didn’t clean your pallet through the process of a painting then that pallet is an abstract representation of your painting.

But it’s not, is it? Because you didn’t intend it to be, sure your brushstrokes, the colors you used, and the relationships between them are all there. But the placement of each stroke is completely arbitrary. And so is the painting, because it’s a dirty pallet.

A misconception is that abstract art is like the dirty artist’s pallet. Created through chance, without purpose, without intent. The superficiality of abstract art created by chance doesn’t go beyond the potential for aestheticism. Yet, abstraction is a spectrum, and you can use it as a tool to create interest in your paintings.

This portrait for instance is representational, but it has abstract elements for visual interest. In this way, the aestheticism of abstraction can play an important role in the allure of an artwork.

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Abstract art

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

Wassily Kandinsky Cossacks (1910–1) Tate

Strictly speaking, the word abstract means to separate or withdraw something from something else.

The term can be applied to art that is based on an object, figure or landscape, where forms have been simplified or schematised.

It 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.

Abstract art is often seen as carrying a moral dimension, in that it can be seen to stand for virtues such as order, purity, simplicity and spirituality.

Since the early 1900s, abstract art has formed a central stream of modern art .

Abstraction across a century

Juan Gris Bottle of Rum and Newspaper (1913–14) Tate

Sonia Delaunay Electric Prisms 1913

Orphism (1912–13): Coined by the French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire. The name comes from the musician Orpheus in ancient Greek myths, as Apollinaire thought that painting should be like music. Main artists Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay also used the term simultanism to describe their work of this period.

Kazimir Malevich Dynamic Suprematism (1915 or 1916) Tate

Naum Gabo Model for ‘Construction in Space ‘Two Cones’’ (1927) Tate

The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams / Tate, London 2023

Theo van Doesburg Counter-Composition VI (1925) Tate

Joan Miró Painting (1927) Tate

Morris Louis Alpha-Phi (1961) Tate

Cubist and fauvist artists depended on the visual world for their subject matter but opened the door for more extreme approaches to abstraction. Pioneers of ‘pure’ abstract painting were Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian from about 1910–20. A pioneer of abstract sculpture, which took reference from the modern world was the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo .

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

Selected artists working with abstraction

Piet mondrian, the first abstract artist (and it's not kandinsky).

Wassily Kandinsky is generally regarded as the pioneer of abstract art. However, a Swedish woman called Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) might claim that title

Fahrelnissa Zeid

Wassily kandinsky, lászló moholy-nagy, bottle and fishes, pablo picasso, dame barbara hepworth, david bomberg, ben nicholson om, mark rothko, howard hodgkin.

There are many theoretical ideas behind abstract art. While some have taken the idea of 'art for art’s sake' (that art should be purely about the creation of beautiful effects), others have proposed art can or should be like music, in that just as music is patterns of sound, art’s effects should be created by pure patterns of form, colour and line. The idea, derived from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, that the highest form of beauty lies not in the forms of the real world but in geometry, is also used in discussion of abstract art, as is the idea that abstract art, since it does not represent the material world, can be seen to represent the spiritual.

Explore this term

Abstraction sans frontières.

Ã‰ric de Chassey

The show at Tate St Ives this summer explores the international context which shaped the work of artists in the Cornish town from the 1940s to 1960s. As Éric de Chassey writes, the broad exchange of ideas was not limited to American artists such as Rothko and de Kooning, but extended to French painters such as Nicolas de Staël, which would also reflect a shared interest in nature and landscape

Optimistic abstraction

Gavin Delahunty

The curator of the forthcoming exhibition by the German abstract painter introduces her work, and a fellow artist pays homage

Chance and Intention: Gerhard Richter’s Abstractions

In this talk art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh looks in great detail at Richter’s responses to painters like Lucio Fontana, Jean Fautrier, and Robert Rauschenberg in 1962

Abstract Connections conference audio recordings

Audio recordings of Abstract Connections conference, held in conjunction with two major exhibitions, Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World and Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at Tate Modern.

Coral and Lichen, Brains and Bowels: Jay DeFeo’s Hybrid Abstraction

Catherine Spencer

Situating the US artist Jay DeFeo within a network of West Coast practitioners during the 1950s and 1960s, this essay shows how her relief paintings – layered with organic, geological and bodily referents – constitute what can be understood as ‘hybrid abstraction’. This has affinities with ‘eccentric abstraction’ and ‘funk art’, but also resonates with the socio-political context of Cold War America.

Abstraction Across Media: David Smith conference audio recordings

Audio recording from the conference Abstraction Across Media: David Smith, with Anne Wagner (University of California, Berkeley), David Anfam (Phaidon Press), Alex Potts (University of Michigan), Jeremy Lewison and Rebecca Smith, daughter of the artist

Related Movements

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted

Fauvism is the name applied to the work produced by a group of artists (which included Henri Matisse and André Derain) from around 1905 to 1910, which is characterised by strong colours and fierce brushwork

Suprematism

Name given by the artist Kazimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913 characterised by basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colours

Constructivism

Constructivism was a particularly austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915

An early form of abstract art characterised by interacting linear forms derived from rays of light

Simultanism

Term invented by artist Robert Delaunay to describe the abstract painting developed by him and his wife Sonia Delaunay from about 1910

Term used to describe the non-geometric abstract art that developed in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s characterized by spontaneous brushwork, drips and scribble-like marks

Neo-plasticism

Neo-plasticism is a term adopted by the Dutch pioneer of abstract art, Piet Mondrian, for his own type of abstract painting which used only horizontal and vertical lines and primary colours

Concrete art

Concrete art is abstract art that is entirely free of any basis in observed reality and that has no symbolic meaning

Objective abstraction

The term objective abstraction refers to a non-geometric style of abstract art developed by a group of British artists in 1933

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterised by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity

Minimalism is an extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s and typified by artworks composed of simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle

Post-painterly abstraction

Post-painterly abstraction is a blanket term covering a range of new developments in abstract painting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, characterised by a more rigorous approach to abstraction

Op art was a major development of painting in the 1960s that used geometric forms to create optical effects

Related Techniques & approaches

Non-objective art.

Non-objective art defines a type of abstract art that is usually, but not always, geometric and aims to convey a sense of simplicity and purity

Art informel

Art informel is a French term describing a swathe of approaches to abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s which had in common an improvisatory methodology and highly gestural technique

Also known as art informel, art autre translates as 'art of another kind' and was used to describe the dominant trend of abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s characterised by an improvisatory approach and highly gestural technique

Gestural is a term used to describe the application of paint in free sweeping gestures with a brush

In art, automatism refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process

Related Groups

Abstraction-création.

Abstraction-Création was an association of abstract artists set up in Paris in 1931 with the aim of promoting abstract art through group exhibitions

American Abstract Artists (AAA)

American Abstract Artists (AAA) is an organisation founded in 1936 to promote the appreciation of abstract art in the United States

De Stijl was a circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals

Penwith Society of Arts

Penwith Society of Arts is an artists' society formed in 1948 at St Ives, Cornwall, Britain by artists working in an abstract style

Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square)

Cercle et Carré was an artist group formed in Paris in 1929 which strongly supported new developments in abstract art and in particular promoted mystical tendencies within it

Réalités nouvelles

The Salon des Réalités nouvelles (new realities) was an exhibiting society devoted to pure abstract art founded in Paris in 1939

The Seven and Five Society

Formed in London in 1919 The Seven and Five Society was initially a traditional group and can be seen as a British manifestation of the return to order that followed the First World War

Bauhaus was a revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919

Abstract Art at Tate

A view from são paulo: abstraction and society.

Explore how geometric abstraction fabricated dreams of a new society in the twentieth century

Be mesmerised by the kaleidoscopic paintings of the international female artist, Fahrelnissa Zeid

Albers and Moholy-Nagy: from the Bauhaus to the New World

Albers and Moholy-Nagy: from the Bauhaus to the New World pas exhibition at Tate Modern

Malevich exhibition at Tate Modern, opens 16 July 2014

Mondrian and his Studios

Mondrian and his Studios, is a new exhibition opening 6 June at Tate Liverpool exploring the artist's relationship with architecture and urbanism

Rothko at Tate Modern 26 September 2008 – 1 February 2009

Abstract Art In The Early 20th Century Essay

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Abstract art emerged in the early 20 th century when artists started creating simplified objections characterized by no or little orientation to the real world. However, traditional cave paintings during ancient times also depicted some elements of abstraction. In this regard, abstract art refers to visual expressions, which do not portray the representation of the visible world’s aspects. It is also known as nonrepresentational or nonobjective art and often comprises largely abstract elements of color, texture, line, form, and tone. Fundamentally, abstract art flourished after World War II as artists tried graphical or sculpture paintings to express their inner feelings or emotions without connecting them to noticeable realities.

The abstract art’s primary aim is to use gestural marks, shapes, forms, and colors to achieve the effects of a visual reality rather than representing its actual depiction. I think artists had the desire to expand the artistic works through creativity, and thus, they had to think of an intellectual way of portraying emotional and sensitive expressionism. As a result, they chose to express themselves using abstract art to share their unique inner feelings with the communities. Arguably, with this imaginative evolution, artists pursued freedom to explore new artworks and assign them unique meanings, which excite their audience. For instance, Wassily Kandinsky is an excellent example of an artist who used abstract art to express his inner emotions. He utilized non-naturistic brushwork and intense colors to exhibit his imagination and internal feelings. I believe Wassily Kandinsky preferred this type of art as an alternative pathway to divine reality.

Abstract art represents a significant transformation of the art industry in the modern world. Instead of depending on visible realities, this kind of art encourages creative imagination to harmonize and unify different forms, colors, tones, and textures to express inner feelings. For example, Wassily Kandinsky used his non-naturistic brushwork and coloring to inspire alternative views on spiritual reality. Therefore, there is a dire need to promote abstract arts because they give artists the freedom to create new artworks and assign them different meanings.

Spirituality in Art: Kandinsky’s "Improvisation 7"
Gallery of Joy: Chagall, Kandinsky, and Miro
Mark Rothko and Abstract Expressionism
“Berlin Street Scene” Painting by E. Kirchner
"Sea Change" by Jackson Pollock at the Seattle Art Museum
Da Vinci’s Last Supper: Artwork Analysis
Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos by Titian: Formal Analysis
Jacob Lawrence’s “New Jersey From the United States” Painting
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

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Essays on Abstract Art

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Geometric Abstraction

Mechanical Elements

Fernand Léger

Standing Figure

Jean Hélion

Second Theme

Burgoyne Diller

Relational Painting Number 64

Fritz Glarner

Homage to the Square: With Rays

Josef Albers

Homage to the Square: Soft Spoken

Large Blue Horizontal

Ilya Bolotowsky

Magdalena Dabrowski Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The pictorial language of geometric abstraction, based on the use of simple geometric forms placed in nonillusionistic space and combined into nonobjective compositions, evolved as the logical conclusion of the Cubist destruction and reformulation of the established conventions of form and space. Initiated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1907–8, Cubism subverted the traditional depiction relying upon the imitation of forms of the surrounding visual world in the illusionistic—post-Renaissance—perspectival space. The Analytic Cubist phase, which reached its peak in mid-1910, made available to artists the planarity of overlapping frontal surfaces held together by a linear grid. The next phase—Synthetic Cubism, 1912–14—introduced the flatly painted synthesized shapes, abstract space, and “constructional” elements of the composition. These three aspects became the fundamental characteristics of abstract geometric art. The freedom of experimentation with different materials and spatial relationships between various compositional parts, which evolved from the Cubist practice of collage and papiers collés (1912), also emphasized the flatness of the picture surface—as the carrier of applied elements—as well as the physical “reality” of the explored forms and materials. Geometric abstraction, through the Cubist process of purifying art of the vestiges of visual reality, focused on the inherent two-dimensional features of painting.

This process of evolving a purely pictorial reality built of elemental geometric forms assumed different stylistic expressions in various European countries and in Russia. In Holland, the main creator and the most important proponent of geometric abstract language was Piet Mondrian (1872–1944). Along with other members of the De Stijl group—Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), Bart van der Leck (1876–1958), and Vilmos Huszár (1884–1960)—Mondrian’s work was intended to convey “absolute reality,” construed as the world of pure geometric forms underlying all existence and related according to the vertical-horizontal principle of straight lines and pure spectral colors. Mondrian’s geometric style, which he termed “Neoplasticism,” developed between 1915 and 1920. In that year, he published his manifesto “Le Néoplasticisme” and for the next two-and-a-half decades continued to work in his characteristic geometric style, expunged of all references to the real world, and posited on the geometric division of the canvas through black vertical and horizontal lines of varied thickness, complemented by blocks of primary colors, particularly blue, red, and yellow. Similar compositional principles underlie the work of the De Stijl artists, who applied them with slight formal modifications to achieve their independent, personal expression.

In Russia, the language of geometric abstraction first appeared in 1915 in the work of the avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) ( Museum of Modern Art , New York), in the style he termed Suprematism. Creating nonobjective compositions of elemental forms floating in white unstructured space, Malevich strove to achieve “the absolute,” the higher spiritual reality that he called the “fourth dimension.” Simultaneously, his compatriot Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) originated a new geometric abstract idiom in an innovative three-dimensional form, which he first dubbed “painterly reliefs” and subsequently “counter-reliefs” (1915–17). These were assemblages of randomly found industrial materials whose geometric form was dictated by their inherent properties, such as wood, metal, or glass. That principle, which Tatlin called “the culture of materials,” spurred the rise of the Russian avant-garde movement Constructivism (1918–21), which explored geometric form in two and three dimensions. The main practitioners of Constructivism included Liubov Popova (1889–1924), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956) ( Museum of Modern Art , New York), Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), and El Lissitzky (1890–1941). It was Lissitzky who became the transmitter of Constructivism to Germany, where its principles were later embodied in the teachings of the Bauhaus . Founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, it became during the 1920s (and until its dismantling by the Nazis in 1933) the vital proponent of geometric abstraction and experimental modern architecture. As a teaching institution, the Bauhaus encompassed different disciplines: painting, graphic arts, stage design, theater, and architecture. The art faculty was recruited from among the most distinguished painters of the time: Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee , Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, all of whom were devoted to the ideal of the purity of geometric form as the most appropriate expression of the modernist canon.

In France, during the 1920s, geometric abstraction manifested itself as the underlying principle of the Art Deco style, which propagated broad use of geometric form for ornamental purposes in the decorative and applied arts as well as in architecture. In the 1930s, Paris became the center of a geometric abstraction that arose out of its Synthetic Cubist sources and focused around the group Cercle et Carré (1930), and later Abstraction-Création (1932). With the outbreak of World War II, the focus of geometric abstraction shifted to New York, where the tradition was continued by the American Abstract Artists group (formed in 1937), including Burgoyne Diller and Ilya Bolotowsky. With the arrival of the Europeans Josef Albers (1933) and Piet Mondrian (1940), and such major events as the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), organized by the Museum of Modern Art, and the creation of the Museum of Non-Objective Art (1939, now the Guggenheim), the geometric tradition acquired a new resonance, but it was essentially past its creative phase. Its influences, however, reached younger generations of artists, most directly affecting the Minimalist art of the 1960s, which used pure geometric form, stripped to its austere essentials, as the primary language of expression. Artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Dorothea Rockburne studied the geometric tradition and transformed it into their own artistic vocabulary.

Dabrowski, Magdalena. “Geometric Abstraction.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geab/hd_geab.htm (October 2004)

Additional Essays by Magdalena Dabrowski

Dabrowski, Magdalena. “ Henri Matisse (1869–1954) .” (October 2004)

Related Essays

Abstract Expressionism
African Influences in Modern Art
Fernand Léger (1881–1955)
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
Paul Klee (1879–1940)
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and American Photography
Anselm Kiefer (born 1945)
Art and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Turkey
The Bauhaus, 1919–1933
Conceptual Art and Photography
Design, 1900–1925
Design, 1925–50
Egyptian Modern Art
Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Neo-Impressionism
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986)
Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
International Pictorialism
Jasper Johns (born 1930)
Letterforms and Writing in Contemporary Art
The Magic of Signs and Patterns in North African Art
Modern Materials: Plastics
Photojournalism and the Picture Press in Germany
Post-Impressionism
The Structure of Photographic Metaphors
West Asia: Postmodernism, the Diaspora, and Women Artists

List of Rulers

Presidents of the United States of America
Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, 1900 A.D.–present
France, 1900 A.D.–present
Low Countries, 1900 A.D.–present
The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present
20th Century A.D.
Abstract Art
American Art
Central Europe
Color Field
Concrete Art
Eastern Europe
Modern and Contemporary Art
Oil on Canvas
Russian Avant-Garde
Scandinavia
United States

Artist or Maker

Albers, Josef
Atget, Eugène
Bolotowsky, Ilya
Booth, Peter
Braque, Georges
Diller, Burgoyne
Glarner, Fritz
Gropius, Walter
Hélion, Jean
Kandinsky, Vasily
Léger, Fernand
Moholy-Nagy, László
Mondrian, Piet
Picasso, Pablo
Rodchenko, Alexander

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Abstract Art Essay Examples

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