Abstraction (art)

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Robert Delaunay, 1912-1913, Le Premier Disque, 134 cm, 52.7 inches, Private collection. A piece of abstract art. Robert Delaunay, 1913, Premier Disque, 134 cm, 52.7 inches, Private collection.jpg
Robert Delaunay, 1912–1913, Le Premier Disque, 134 cm, 52.7 inches, Private collection. A piece of abstract art.

Typically, abstraction is used in the arts as a synonym for abstract art in general.

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In the visual arts

Strictly speaking, it refers to art unconcerned with the literal depiction of things from the visible world [1] —it can, however, refer to an object or image which has been distilled from the real world, or indeed, another work of art. Artwork that reshapes the natural world for expressive purposes is called abstract; that which derives from, but does not imitate a recognizable subject is called nonobjective abstraction. In the 20th century the trend toward abstraction coincided with advances in science, technology, and changes in urban life, eventually reflecting an interest in psychoanalytic theory. [2] Later still, abstraction was manifest in more purely formal terms, such as color, freedom from objective context, and a reduction of form to basic geometric designs and shapes. [3]

In music

In music, the term abstraction can be used to describe improvisatory approaches to interpretation, and may sometimes indicate abandonment of tonality. Atonal music has no key signature, and is characterized by the exploration of internal numeric relationships. [4]

Related Research Articles

Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process wherein general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal signifiers, first principles, or other methods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modernism</span> Philosophical and art movement

Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, architecture, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wassily Kandinsky</span> Russian painter and art theorist

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art, possibly after Hilma af Klint. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art School. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat —Kandinsky began painting studies at the age of 30.

In software engineering and computer science, abstraction is:

Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abstract art</span> Art with a degree of independence from visual references in the world

Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clement Greenberg</span> American essayist and visual art critic (1909-1994)

Clement Greenberg, occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock.

Abstraction in mathematics is the process of extracting the underlying structures, patterns or properties of a mathematical concept, removing any dependence on real world objects with which it might originally have been connected, and generalizing it so that it has wider applications or matching among other abstract descriptions of equivalent phenomena. Two of the most highly abstract areas of modern mathematics are category theory and model theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Color field</span> Art movement

Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tachisme</span> French style of abstract painting

Tachisme is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. The term is said to have been first used with regards to the movement in 1951. It is often considered to be the European response and equivalent to abstract expressionism, although there are stylistic differences. It was part of a larger postwar movement known as Art Informel, which abandoned geometric abstraction in favour of a more intuitive form of expression, similar to action painting. Another name for Tachism is Abstraction lyrique. COBRA is also related to Tachisme, as is Japan's Gutai group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Synchromism</span> Art movement

Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973) and Morgan Russell (1886–1953). Their abstract "synchromies," based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art. Though it was short-lived and did not attract many adherents, Synchromism became the first American avant-garde art movement to receive international attention. One of the difficulties inherent in describing Synchromism as a coherent style is connected to the fact that some Synchromist works are purely abstract while others include representational imagery.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geometric abstraction</span> Form of abstract art involving geometry

Geometric abstraction is a form of abstract art based on the use of geometric forms sometimes, though not always, placed in non-illusionistic space and combined into non-objective (non-representational) compositions. Although the genre was popularized by avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century, similar motifs have been used in art since ancient times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lyrical abstraction</span> Art movement

Lyrical abstraction is either of two related but distinct trends in Post-war Modernist painting:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Western painting</span> Art produced in the Western world

The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity until the present time. Until the mid-19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.

In the visual arts, late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and post-modernism although there are differences. The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is contemporary art. Not all art labelled as contemporary art is modernist or post-modern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modern and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject modernism for post-modernism or other reasons. Arthur Danto argues explicitly in After the End of Art that contemporaneity was the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a subsector of the contemporary movement which replaced modernity and modernism, while other notable critics: Hilton Kramer, Robert C. Morgan, Kirk Varnedoe, Jean-François Lyotard and others have argued that postmodern objects are at best relative to modernist works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Painting</span> Practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">20th-century Western painting</span> Art in the Western world during the 20th century

20th-century Western painting begins with the heritage of late-19th-century painters Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others who were 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. Matisse's second version of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The arts</span> Creative human and cultural expression

The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural and individual identities, while transmitting values, impressions, judgments, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life and experiences across time and space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Informalism</span>

Informalism or Art Informel is a pictorial movement from the 1943–1950s, that includes all the abstract and gestural tendencies that developed in France and the rest of Europe during the World War II, similar to American abstract expressionism started 1946. Several distinguishing trends are identified within the movement such as lyrical abstraction, matter painting, New Paris School, tachisme and art brut. The French art critic Michel Tapié coined the term "art autre" in the homonymous book published in 1952 in relation to non-geometric abstract art. It was instrumental in improving the concept of abstract art in France during the Early 1950s. Its use in the expression of political ideologies in South America during the Early 1950s was quite common, as it was seen as the main way to show support for the changing political climate.

American verismo describes an artistic style of American literature, music, or painting influenced and inspired by artistic ideas that began in 19th-century Italian culture, movements that used motifs from everyday life and working class persons from both urban and rural situations. American composers, writers, painters, and poets have used this genre to create works that contain socio-political as well as purely aesthetic statements.

References

  1. Encyclopædia Britannica
  2. Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher (eds.), 3 X Abstraction. NY/New Haven: The Drawing Center/Yale University Press. 2005. ISBN   0-300-10826-5
  3. National Gallery of Art: Abstraction. Retrieved 31 January 2013.
  4. Washington State University: Glossary of Abstraction. Retrieved 31 January 2013.