History

main: Western painting

Abstraction in early art and many cultures

Main: Eastern art history Much of the art of earliest peoples: signs and marks on pottery, textiles and inscriptions and paintings on rock ; were simple, geometric and linear forms which might reveal a symbolic or decorative purpose. It is at this level of visual rather than literary meaning that abstract art communicates. One can enjoy the beauty of an Chinese calligraphy or Islamic script, for example, without being able to read it.

19th century

Three art movements which contributed to the development of abstract art were Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism. Artistic independence for artists was advanced during the 19th century. Patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable of providing a livlihood for artists.

Early intimations of a new art had been made by James McNeill Whistler who, in his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The falling Rocket, (1872), placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than the depiction of objects. An objective interest in what is seen, can be discerned from the paintings of John Constable, J M W Turner, Camille Corot and from them to the Impressionists who continued the plein air painting of the Barbizon school. Paul Cezanne had begun as an Impressionist but his aim: to make a logical construction of reality based on a view from a single point , with modulated colour in flat areas, became the basis of a new visual art, later to be developed into Cubism by George Braque, Pablo Picasso.

Expressionist painters explored the bold use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations, and intense color. Expressionists produced emotionally charged paintings that were reactions to and perceptions of contemporary experience; and reactions to Impressionism and other more conservative directions of late 19th century painting. The Expressionists also drastically changed the emphasis on subject matter in favor of the portrayal of psychological states of being. Although artists like Edvard Munch and James Ensor drew influences principally from the work of the Post-Impressionists they were instrumental to the advent of abstraction in the 20th century.

20th century

Post Impressionism as practiced by Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cezanne had an enormous impact on 20th century art and led to the advent of 20th century abstraction. The heritage of painters like Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Seurat was essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. The raw language of color as developed by the Fauves directly influenced another pioneer of abstraction Wassily Kandinsky (see illustration).