Abstraction frees shape and color from copying the visible world
Abstract art builds compositions from shape, form, color, and line that need not depict recognizable things. From Renaissance perspective to mid-nineteenth-century illusionism, Western painting chased visible reality—until artists sought languages for new science, technology, and philosophy.
Related labels—non-figurative, non-objective, non-representational—overlap without identical meaning. Abstraction is a continuum: slight color shifts, cubist fractured forms, or total geometries with no worldly referent. Fauvism and cubism exemplify partial abstraction; geometric and lyrical abstraction often go all the way.
As church patronage waned and private buyers rose, Romanticism, Impressionism, and Expressionism loosened academic rules. Whistler’s 1872 Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket prized sensation over objects; Georgiana Houghton’s earlier “spirit” drawings used abstract shapes for unnatural subjects. Expressionists pushed distorted drawing and intense color against conservative late-century taste. Houghton even staged her own exhibition in 1871, before abstraction existed as a named idea. By the close of the century many painters wanted an art equal to the upheavals in science, technology and philosophy, and their theories came from strikingly varied corners of Western thought.
Several routes led to the break. Constable, Turner and Corot looked hard at what the eye actually receives, and the Impressionists carried forward Barbizon habits of painting outdoors. Munch and Ensor, drawing mostly on the Post-Impressionists, turned subject matter toward inner psychological states and helped open the door to twentieth-century abstraction. Cézanne, who started among the Impressionists, tried to build a logical structure of reality from one viewpoint using flat patches of modulated colour, the seed of Cubism. Meanwhile Madame Blavatsky's theosophy, and the mystical teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, shaped pioneers of geometric work such as Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky.
Source: Abstract art
