What is abstract art? The pioneers, the movements and how to look at it

Abstract art is art that does not depict objects, people or landscapes but works with colour, form, line and rhythm in themselves. It took shape around 1910 with artists such as Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, and became one of the most important movements of the 20th century.

Facts

What does abstract mean?

The word abstract comes from the Latin abstrahere, to draw away. It is sometimes used of pictures that have simplified a subject until only the essential remains, but in the strict sense abstract art is completely non-representational. It shows nothing that exists outside the picture.

The idea was radical. For centuries painting's task had been to depict. Now artists argued that colours and forms could act directly on the viewer, much as music does without representing anything. Many of the pioneers also compared their pictures to music and gave them names like compositions and improvisations.

The pioneers

Hilma af Klint began painting large abstract works in Stockholm as early as 1906, several years before her better-known colleagues. The series The Ten Largest of 1907 depicts human life from childhood to old age in huge, colourful forms. She was deeply engaged in spiritual teachings and wanted the works not to be shown until long after her death. Only with a large exhibition at Moderna Museet in 2013 did she achieve her international breakthrough.

Wassily Kandinsky wrote the book Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1911 and painted works such as Composition VII of 1913. In Russia Kazimir Malevich exhibited a black square on a white ground in 1915 and called his movement Suprematism.

The geometric line

In the Netherlands the group De Stijl was formed in 1917. Piet Mondrian reduced painting to black horizontal and vertical lines and fields in the three primary colours, as in Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow of 1930. He wanted to express a universal harmony.

Geometric abstraction continued in so-called Concrete art, which wanted the picture to be an object in itself and not a picture of something. In Sweden Otto G. Carlsund was an early advocate, and after the war Olle Baertling painted his sharp, open triangular forms.

The gestural line

After the Second World War New York became the centre of abstraction. Jackson Pollock laid his canvases on the floor and dripped and flung paint over them, as in Autumn Rhythm of 1950. The act of painting itself became the subject, and the movement is called Abstract Expressionism or action painting.

Mark Rothko went in the opposite direction, towards still, floating fields of colour as in No. 61 (Rust and Blue). He wanted viewers to stand close and be absorbed by the colour. In the 1960s Bridget Riley and other Op artists explored how patterns can make the eye see movement.

How do you look at abstract art?

Start with what you actually see: the colours, the forms and how they relate to one another. Is the picture calm or restless, heavy or light? Is there a rhythm, a direction or a centre? Size matters; many abstract works are made to envelop the viewer. The title and the date can give clues but need not dictate.

Abstract art requires no prior knowledge, but it does require time. Stay a few minutes in front of a picture and notice what happens. More pictures are gathered under the theme of abstraction, and the guide on how to read a painting offers a step-by-step approach.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which Swedish artist painted abstract works as early as 1906?