The abstract painter

“Abstract painting” is an important part of modern art. For the figurative painter, this new branch of the visual arts is a world to discover. The codes that compose it are simply different. Before the birth of abstract painting, each work had a subject or motif, for example, portraits, landscapes, still lifes. The contemporary painter no longer needs to represent reality to create emotion or reflection on the world. This is a fundamental difference. This article gives you some historical basis on the appearance of this movement. Its goal is to offer you some knowledge that will better enable you to appreciate this art during your future visits to museums or exhibitions. However, many people think that abstract painting is difficult to approach.

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Abstract Painting

The beginnings of abstract art

Around the years 1910-1930, an upheaval occurred in painting. The appearance of abstraction. For the first time, painters dare to exhibit paintings without any recognizable motif. The works only refer to themselves. It only expresses the strength of colors and lines.

This artistic upheaval occurred simultaneously in Moscow, Paris and Munich, on the eve of the First World War. The best known of these trends is Cubism, founded by Braque and Picasso. The latter was himself influenced by the post-impressionism of Cézanne, who is called the father of modern painting.

Later, during the First World War, surrealism appeared, stemming in part from psychoanalysis and Dadaism. He rejects the anti-aesthetic attitude and established framework of abstract painting. Surrealism had a great influence on abstract painting.

The trauma of the war of 14-18 favors new, more or less esoteric spiritualities which seek to express themselves in the arts. The newly emerged psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud also played an important role in the birth of a new art. Scientific and technical advances undoubtedly also play a role. In this post-war context of the early 20th century, visible reality certainly becomes less significant in art than mental representations. The horrors of war can no longer be expressed through simple images. We must go further in the search for pure emotion. For certain painters, with this new paradigm, an aesthetic universe finally opens up.

From then on, abstract painting explored new aesthetic forms. Different styles of abstraction were born simultaneously from 1911 to 1917 with its founders ; Frantisek Kupka , Wassily Kandinsky , Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian .

The three main types of abstraction

From abstraction, three branches are distinguished, namely warm and cold abstraction and informal painting. Note that Vasily Kandinsky is the creator of the first abstract watercolor.

Opposite to so-called hot abstraction, we find cold abstraction which corresponds to geometric abstraction. With strokes, lines, squares, circles and triangles, geometric painting is an art that favors pure plasticity. Informal painting is instinctive.

Spontaneity: warm abstraction

Wassily Kandinski is the father of warm abstraction, which is also called lyrical abstraction . This technique advocates spontaneity to release pure emotion on the canvas. There is no intellectual process in this creative form. Only gesture and emotions predominate.

Rigor: cold abstraction

During the same period, certain artists endeavored to express the essence of aesthetics through geometry. This is notably the research of the painter Piet Mondrian . For him, the bases of an abstract painting must involve geometric shapes. They must be made up of these elementary bricks which are squares, triangles, in primary colors. Concretely, cold abstraction requires rigor in the harmony of colors and shapes.

Informal painting

The term “informal” was used for the first time in 1951 by Michel Tapié . Informal art corresponds to new extreme experiences.

The best representatives are Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Georges Mathieu. Informal painting is characterized by an opposition to cubism and surrealism. It can be defined by the search, on the canvas, for a harmonious unity of shapes and colors. The proportions between the pictorial elements are instinctively defined with the painter's gesture. It is an abstract painting composed of signs whose aesthetic meaning is calculated in real time.

Towards a new contemporary abstract painter

The painter's change of attitude towards abstraction gradually changes when the weight of discovery is lifted from him. He is no longer a conqueror, but an artist in the same way as all the others. Abstract art enters painting schools. His teaching became academic, provoking numerous debates on mixing genres. Gerhard Richter is a significant model, moving from the figurative to the abstract with great mastery. In this, he follows in the footsteps of Wassily Kandinsky. The figurative and abstract conflict calms down and opens new avenues for artists who no longer feel locked into a given style. It gives free rein to their imagination without the constraints of the past. The legacy of the first abstract painters is considerable and still stimulates reflection on the nature of aesthetics.

How to appreciate abstract painters

Abstract paintings lack specific patterns and some people may have a negative reaction to looking at them. We will see together in this article how to appreciate abstract painting.

Learn to see

“It doesn’t look like anything” or “A child could do it.” This is the kind of remark you sometimes hear at abstract art exhibitions.

We are used to dealing with reality in our daily lives. With abstraction, our minds cannot latch on to a logical explanation of what is being seen. It is lost and it is then the only force of the image that operates.

To become familiar with abstract painting, let's learn to look at the world around us outside of the concepts that define it. A tree can be seen as a set of green spots crossed by darker lines. By lowering the eyelids so that only a thread of light passes through, vision changes. It becomes more blurred and almost unreal. So, focus on the shapes and colors, without trying to define what you were seeing. This experience should bring you closer to the best way to look at an abstract painting.

Abstract painting is not the name of an artistic movement. It is a pictorial expression that has separated itself from classical painting. In the creative process, painters react like you, when you make the effort to detach yourself from concepts. The act of looking is therefore also a creative act.

“All forms in nature are treated with cylinders, spheres and cones.” Paul Cézanne.

Just enjoy the beauty

One of the ways to appreciate works is to let your gaze wander without trying to understand. The colors are bright and lovely, the composition is bold and the texture of the paint is interesting? So let yourself be overwhelmed by the image.

A fun method is to associate what you see with music. Musical harmony and painting have things in common. It is the same for poetry, which is the music of words.

Synesthesia is a particularity that allows people to associate colors with musical notes, but also with letters. Wasily Kandinsky, one of the founders of abstract painting, was synesthetic. Thus, it is not incongruous to think of music while looking at his works.

Understand context and meaning

It's good to appreciate a work with your sensitivity. However, if you know the context of the creation of this work, your pleasure will be much deeper. Knowledge of artistic movements and particular artists helps you “get into” the works. The painting before your eyes becomes part of the great history of art and you have the feeling of being a witness to it.

The artistic movements of abstract painting

Cubism (around 1907)

Cubism is attributed to Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso.

Until then, figurative paintings were drawn from a single object, but Cubism invented a method to capture the shape of the object seen from different angles and in a single image.

This technique, which surprised many artists, has been transmitted to the present day. It is one of the most important inventions in the history of modern art.

Expressive abstraction

Pure abstract painting is also called "self-expressive abstraction". It is an abstract painting that uses the inner Self as the basis for creative action.

Vasily Kandinsky is a representative artist of this type of abstract painting. He was strongly influenced by the mystical and global worldview of the Russian symbolists, as well as by theosophy in which he began to take an interest from 1908.

Neoplasticism (around 1920)

Neoplasticism is a theory of geometric abstract art proposed by Mondrian. In 1911, Mondrian was deeply impressed by Picasso's Cubist works. He went to Paris and deepened his discussions with various painters. It was then that he considered that Cubism moved away from the pure conception of abstraction. For the painter, you have to go to the essential. For him, geometric shapes and primary colors are the essence of abstract art. His thoughts would later inspire the minimalists.

Action painting (around 1950)

The abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock is the leading figure of “action painting”. It is a style in which we use the gesture in splashes, drips or large brush strokes. The meaning and aesthetics come from the movements of the painter.

Color Field (circa 1950)

A color field is a pictorial expression in which a colored “area” occupies a large portion of the screen. The entire canvas is completely smooth with no center or focal point. It has few motives and no object. Each color or geometric line plays an important role. Artists, who belong to abstract expressionism, such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Ronald Davis, are representative of this movement.

Ten renowned abstract painters!

Kazimir Malevich

Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) is one of the Russian avant-garde artists who created the concept of suprematism. Malevich encountered Cubism in Paris and his style shifted towards pure geometric abstraction. His representative work “Black Square” is his first abstract painting. It is now in the Tretyakov Gallery in Russia. “Painterly Realism of a Football Player” is also a very significant work of his work.

Malevich completely eliminated the meaning contained in his paintings. He established a style of representing minimal shapes such as squares, triangles and circles, this is suprematism . However, Kazimir Malevich was unable to speak in his country, the Soviet Union. Satline having banned his painting, he had to turn to figurative painting in order to avoid the camps ending his career at the age of 57.

Wasily Kandinsky

Wasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a pioneer of Russian abstract painting. Classically trained, he masters figurative art, but he wants to express more than reality and turns to abstraction. From the beginning of the 1910s, he renounced the figurative and his paintings became a symphony of colored spots which exploded in all directions. This is called warm abstraction or lyrical abstraction.

The warm abstraction, by Kandinsky, is inspired by Monet's "haystacks" . Vasily Kandinsky is one of the founders of abstract art. Painting is for him the language of sensitivity, which says with shapes and colors what words cannot express. With Kandinsky, art gains absolute freedom and everything becomes possible.

Kandinsky divides his works into three types depending on the distance from the object: "impression", "improvisation" and "composition".

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881 – April 8, 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist who spent most of his adult life in France. He is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and founder of the Cubist movement. In addition, Picasso's artistic style is plural encompassing all the plastic arts.

Paul Klee

Paul Klee (1879-1940) was a Swiss painter who was part of the group of painters " The Blue Rider" with Kandinsky and others. He also taught at the Bauhaus .

Klee was familiar with music from an early age. He participated in the Bern orchestra from the age of 11. However, his interest in painting led him to pursue his career in this direction. He was influenced by expressionism, cubism and surrealism.

Klee's style is characterized by rich colors. After a trip to Tunisia, he became aware of the expression of color. He said that color and he were one.

Joan Miro

Joan Miró (1893-1983) was a Spanish painter as influential as Picasso and Dali. Inspired by [surrealism]( https://museeduluxembourg.fr/fr/actualite/quest-ce-que-le-surrealisme#:~:text=Surrealism is a movement, from the First World War.) , his painting is often described as abstract surrealism. The presence on his canvases of numerous symbols such as birds, stars and the sun gives the viewer the impression of an explosion of energy.

Miro lived in poverty until his friend Ernest Hemingway bought him one of his main works, “The Farm”.

Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) is the father of Dutch abstract painting. She is opposed to Kandinsky and this term “cold abstraction”. Mondrian participated in the Dutch art movement. He also influenced the Bauhaus. Mondrian's artistic expression makes colors and shapes as simple as possible. Through Yves Saint-Laurent, his work had a great impact on fashion in 1965, notably with the representative painting, “Composition 2 rouge, bleu et jaune”, the “Mondrian Look”. His influence will be origin of minimalist.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), was born in the United States. He is the leader of " action painting " which is a technique which does not use brushes, but drips and jets of paint on a canvas placed on the ground. Dripping

Influenced by Miró, Pollock expresses himself through action based on the concept of the unconscious. He is one of the best-known representatives of “abstract expressionism”.

Jackson Pollock suffered from alcoholism for a long time and died suddenly at the age of 44 in 1956. After driving drunk, he crashed into a tree.

Mark Rothko

The Russian-Jewish American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is one of the representative painters of post-war art. Mark Rothko was a studious student, but he dropped out of Yale University to pursue an artistic career. Rothko knew Greek mythology which brought him closer to the surrealists. He was influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The “Rothko style” is a work on color with a background of spirituality. It is a meditation painting.

Frank Stella

American painter and sculptor Frank Stella was born in 1936. Beyond abstract expressionism, he is also known as a leading figure in minimal art. Stella studied art history at Princeton University. Jasper Johns ' solo exhibition , he reduced his paintings to the bare minimum of elements to produce the "Black Painting Series".

Breaking with abstract expressionism, Stella describes her work as “a flat, painted surface, nothing more”.

In 1959, he was selected for the 16 American Artists Exhibition (Museum of Modern Art, New York), and the following year he organized a solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery , a legendary gallery which led American art after -war.

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman (1905-1970) is an artist representative of abstract expressionism and “action painting” with Pollock and Rothko. Born in New York, United States, to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, Neumann worked as a critic and curator before beginning his career as a painter in 1944 at the age of 40. His style is characterized by a uniform treatment of color, which is crossed by one or more vertical lines that he calls Zip.

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