The Origins of Conceptual Art
In the first half of the 19th century, a number of pioneers including Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and William Henry Fox Talbot invented the field of photography and popularized it. As people, places, and events could increasingly be documented cheaply and easily, the need for artists to memorialize these in paint became less important. At the same time, many artists were also frustrated by the stylistic restrictions placed on them by the Royal Academies (Academic Art), institutions of great importance in England and France that had become the arbiters of taste in the art world. Only mythological and historical subjects as well as landscapes were deemed widely acceptable and realism in their portrayal was paramount.
These two factors encouraged artists to rebel against traditional artistic depictions by seeking new subjects and styles and to experiment with what paint could do that photography could not. Impressionism arose in the late-19th century in Paris, with painters including Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir interested in creating images of contemporary life with an emphasis on capturing movement and the changing qualities of light. Their works were characterized by being painted outdoors (en plein air), visible brushstrokes, and the use of pure, unmixed colors.
As Impressionism developed, artists began to increase the degree of abstraction in their work, even dispensing with horizon lines and clear forms altogether. Monet was perhaps the most extreme; his late work, from the 1920s, features abstraction to such a degree that, at times, the depicted subject is not apparent to the viewer. While not all Impressionist works are viewed as strictly abstract, many are seen as proto-abstract as a result of their painterly and subjective renderings.
Many artists working in an Impressionist style began to seek new ways to express themselves personally through their art, often engaging more with abstraction in the process. Rather than the Impressionists’ painterly style, Paul Gauguin experimented with emphasizing areas of solid color and defined forms with outlines, dispensing with traditional perspective. He also used color symbolically and referred to his style as Synthetism, in that he used formal elements to convey his feelings. Vincent van Gogh also moved away from traditional perspective, which is particularly evident in his depictions of the sky, featuring flat blues with stars or clouds overlaid in a pattern-like fashion. His paintings were characterized by thick brushstrokes and brilliant hues.
While Gauguin and van Gogh both engaged with abstraction out of a desire for personal expression, Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne were more interested in structural composition. Seurat created a style he called Pointillism where different dots of pure color were painted next to one another. When viewed closely his paintings appear to be an abstract assortment of colors, but from a distance they form a coherent and unified scene. Cézanne was concerned in exploring the use of planes and intense color to represent depth, stating “I seek to render perspective only through color”. This ultimately led him to depict objects as they appeared from multiple perspectives simultaneously. While not totally abstract, all of these artists worked with abstraction in some form, and the personal expression and compositional freedom shown in their pieces, influenced other artists to take abstraction even further.
The Rise of Non-Objective Art
Inspired by Cézanne’s experimentation, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered Cubism as a way to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional canvas. This resulted in the simplification of a scene into its key constituent parts and the use of geometric shapes to depict objects and people. Although Cubist paintings were based in reality, their aggressive engagement with shapes resulted in many of their paintings appearing completely abstract to the viewer. Cubism went farther into abstraction than Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, establishing an engagement with the flatness of the canvas and new abstract ways to represent reality.
There is some debate about who created the first completely abstract work of art, but Wassily Kandinsky claimed this honor for himself and he was certainly one of the early artists to engage with purely nonrepresentational art. Though he initially created realistic and then semi-abstract works, Kandinsky wanted to create works that depicted the way he felt when listening to music. A theorist in addition to artist, in 1911, he wrote the influential text Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in which he linked different colors with specific emotions and musical notes, a response that we now recognize as synesthesia, a rare condition where two senses are linked. He began to create entirely nonobjective art in the same year and his abstract works contain a sense of rhythm and joy, entirely evocative of the music that he loved.
Recently, however, the work of Swedish painter, Hilma af Klint has come to greater attention and it is now believed that she created completely abstract art some years earlier than Kandinsky, in 1906. Klint studied art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and after graduation worked as a portrait and landscape painter. As a young woman, she discovered Theosophy, a religious movement that had links to spiritualism and this shaped her early abstract works. She believed that she was being guided by spirits and she sought to capture these invisible forces on canvas. As a result, between November 1906 and March 1907 she created a series of works called Primordial Chaos, some of which have a representative element whilst others are fully abstract. She followed this with another abstract series of large works called The Ten Biggest and she continued to develop her abstraction through the 1910s, moving from more organic forms to geometric ones.
Other pioneers of completely abstract art included Piet Mondrian, whose abstract art was also rooted in the Theosophy movement. He produced his first non-representational pieces in 1913, stating that he sought “to articulate a mystic conception of cosmic harmony that lay behind the surfaces of reality”. Throughout the next two decades, he continued to refine and simplify his compositions. Around the same time, Russian avant-garde artist, Kasimir Malevich also began to experiment with geometric abstraction and around 1915, he produced Black Square. This consisted of a simple black square painted onto a white background. It was the most radically abstract painting yet to be created and as Russian essayist, Tatyana Tolstaya, argues, it “once and for all drew an uncrossable line that demarcated the chasm between old art and new art”.
The Influence of Dada and Surrealism
Dada started in 1916 in Zurich in direct reaction to the horrors experienced in World War I. Questioning the very fundamentals of society itself, and, in extension, art, its advocates turned from traditional painting and sculpture to nontraditional media and methods. Proponents advocated strategies such as collaboration, spontaneity, and chance, and, while the movement was not entirely abstract, abstraction was a logical arena to be explored in that it had the ability to represent non-rational subjects. Francis Picabia created paintings featuring mechanical forms with no relation to reality, whilst Jean (Hans) Arp exploited the nature of chance, creating abstract works out of bits of paper thrown in the air and glued where they fell. Arp’s techniques were influential on both Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Instead of using rational thought to plan out an image, the inclusion of elements of chance allowed artists to completely free their minds while creating their art.
Like Dada, while Surrealism was not an entirely abstract movement, many of its practitioners made steps that resulted in significant advances in abstraction. The movement was originally literary, and their engagement with automatic writing, intended to facilitate access to the unconscious, spread into the visual arts in a variety of techniques. Surrealists also incorporated Dada’s interest in new media and chance into the pseudo-abstract techniques, decalcomania and grattage. Decalcomania consisted of pressing paint between sheets of paper, while grattage was scratching wet paint with a tool and working with the patterns or images that emerged. André Masson, who had briefly been associated with Cubism, began to create free-association drawings featuring continuous lines, out of which figures and recognizable forms sometimes appeared. As a result of World War II, Masson was exiled to New York and continued his artistic investigation of automatism, ultimately influencing the New York School. Joan Miró, on the other hand, merged automatist drawing with abstract forms alongside vestiges of realistic representation. His Surrealist work was ultimately reliant upon a unique lexicon of symbols and figures from an artistic language he developed over many years. Roberto Matta also merged automatism with abstraction; early on, he eschewed figuration in favor of using abstract symbols in an attempt to represent his inner world.
Abstract Expressionism and Beyond
Abstract Expressionism was the first entirely abstract movement in the United States. It emerged in the late-1940s and 1950s, partly in reaction to World War II. Looking back to Archaic and Indigenous art as well as automatism and Jungian psychology, members of the New York School searched for ways to express their own psyches that would tap into universal emotions in order to be timeless. The two major iterations of the movement were Action Painting and Color Field painting. Jackson Pollock was an exponent of the former. He began to pour and drip paint onto unmounted, unprimed canvas on the floor, often stepping into the painting during the process. He created entirely nonobjective paintings in which the only sense of illusion lay in drips of paint lying on top of one another. Willem de Kooning, was also an Action Painter, working in an abstract fashion while utilizing recognizable imagery, as in his Women series. In this he sought to create a metaphorical, iconic symbol of women, alluding to prehistoric cave women as well as modern-day advertisements.
In reaction to the gestural nature of action paintings, artists Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly created paintings termed Hard Edge Abstraction, so named because they emphasized clear forms based on simple shapes and monochromatic, smooth paint application with bright colors squeezed straight from the tube. This technique consciously removed the personal elements from Abstract Expressionism. In contrast to these paintings, which are characterized by an active, painterly surface, Color Field painters created large-scale works dominated by a few hues carefully applied in solid swathes. These fields of colors attempted to envelop the viewer, engendering a sense of the smallness of self in face of the unknowable. Barnett Newman’s mature works consisted of a monochrome hue punctuated by vertical striations he termed “zips”, which were intended to result in the sense of an encounter with an elemental presence on the part of the viewer. Mark Rothko arrived at his stacked rectangles in 1949. In various color combinations, the works are characterized by their vertical orientation with two or three horizontal rectangles hovering on the canvas, with the content lying in the color and simple shapes. Scaled to human size and hung low, like Newman’s “zips”, standing before these paintings can result in feeling a sense of contact with an otherworldly presence.
Growing out of Color Field Painting, Post-Painterly Abstraction was a group of related movements. As part of these, Helen Frankenthaler notably created a soak stain technique, which she used to create abstractions based on nature. Other artists such as Morris Louis and Jules Olitski used this in their own more decorative abstract paintings.
Art Informel is often viewed as the European equivalent to Abstract Expressionism and arose in a similar time period. It was an umbrella term for a variety of movements that emphasized intuition over rationality in the hopes of creating universally accessible art. Tachisme, one iteration of Art Informel, started in France. Named for the French word tache, meaning “stain” or “spot”, the movement was characterized by a gestural, intuitive application of paint, featuring large brushstrokes, drips, and splashes of color. This style of abstraction featured in the experimental output of both the CoBrA group in central Europe and the Gutai group in Japan. CoBrA artists drew inspiration from ancient Nordic myths, children’s drawings, and art created by the mentally ill. In a bright palette with a free hand, many of their works featured abstracted, fantastic animals, which they believed to be symbolic of the bestial nature of humanity revealed by the Second World War. Gutai artists, on the other hand, sought to capture the “spirit of life” stating in their 1956 manifesto that “We have decided to pursue enthusiastically the possibilities of pure creativity. We believe that by merging human qualities and material properties, we can concretely comprehend abstract space.”
The Op Art movement of the 1960s focused on the creation of works that appeared to move as a result of color relationships and patterns. Thus, while epitomizing an allover canvas like Jackson Pollock, it was with a complete lack of interest in a metaphorical expression of self. Minimalism is often viewed as a form of extreme abstraction in that there was no intention of meaning apart from the self-referentiality of the object through an emphasis on form and material. The subject matter of Minimalist paintings consisted of grids, geometric shapes or lines, or even an investigation of a painting composed of black or white paint. Minimal sculptors often preferred the term “objects” for their work, and utilized industrial materials such as steel, fiberglass, and plexiglass.
The Emergence of Conceptual Art
At the very outset of modernism, many artists interested in abandoning figurative painting in favor of more expressive, abstract works saw music as a logical inspiration. This notion was particularly compelling as a result of the modernist idea that all art forms were related. Kandinsky perhaps made this connection most explicit in that he analogized music and abstraction, stating “music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist’s soul, in musical sound.”
The artist thus titled his abstract works variously Impressions, Improvisations, and Compositions, and through arranging colors and simple geometric shapes rhythmically, sought to express the way music made him feel, resulting in the creation of some of the first entirely abstract paintings. Post-Impressionist van Gogh was profoundly affected by psalms, hymns, and the compositions of Richard Wagner, using color and patterning in order to portray the intense emotions he felt Wagner expressed musically. Piet Mondrian too was interested in imbuing his rigorous, geometric abstractions with music. Upon moving to New York and being exposed to boogie-woogie music for the first time, he created his Boogie-Woogie series, directly likening the music to his individual brand of abstraction, describing it as a “destruction of melody which is the destruction of natural appearance; and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means – dynamic rhythm.”
Straddling the line between American realism and European avant-garde abstraction, Stuart Davis took the language of Synthetic Cubism into his abstractions inspired by jazz and swing music, which he viewed as the musical counterpoint to abstraction. Similarly, while Georgia O’Keeffe worked in both figuration and abstraction, she credited music as inspiring many of her abstract works, musing that “music could be translated into something for the eye” and thus able to express things out of the bounds of representation. Founders of Synchronism, a movement credited with the first American nonobjective theory of painting, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, sought to arrange and use color in the same way that notes and instruments were used to arrange melodies. More recently, African-American artists Sam Gilliam and Stanley Whitney echo jazz in their abstract paintings, thus making works with social agency in an abstract fashion outside of the Black Arts Movement.
The exploration of alternative spiritualities were, and continue to be, a rich arena for various developments of abstraction. As a result of her interest in, and practice of, spiritualism, Hilma af Klint, credited a spiritual being with guiding her own hand when creating hundreds of abstract paintings intended to adorn a temple. Wassily Kandinsky’s principal aim as an artist was to express the spiritual, which to him was closely related to his experience of listening to music. Piet Mondrian’s goal with his own rigorous abstraction was to transcend narrative particulars in order to create a universal expression, closely tied in with what he termed his own inner reality. Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism, an extremely simplified style which had no ties to the outside world, was called this as he linked supremacy of pure feeling to form. He felt his Suprematist works enabled viewers to perceive the ineffability and infinite of the Absolute. Members of the New York School became fascinated by Indigenous art forms in that they believed them to be precursors to modern art and rife with American-specific subject matter, ultimately drawing on them in their abstract works. This interest in Indigenous art was closely linked with the spiritual values they viewed as inherent in the objects. Artist Adolph Gottlieb noted that “While modern art got its first impetus through discovering the forms of primitive art, we feel that its true significance lies not merely in formal arrangement, but in the spiritual meaning underlying all archaic works”.
Sculpture and the Conceptual Shift
As with painting, abstract sculpture can either be based on something in reality or totally nonobjective. Constantin Brâncuși is an early exponent of the former, as illustrated by his sculptures of birds in flight, evoked through elegant elliptical lines. Through a process of gradual simplification, his sculptures were able to capture the essence of his subject. Brancusi stated that “What my