A short history of abstraction

A short history of abstraction

Introduction: Once upon a time: the image.

Figure 1: Caravaggio, Narcissus, 1598-1599

There are no less than 13 definitions of this word in Larousse, from a scientific, material or symbolic point of view. The image is part of our environment. Each blink of an eyelash makes us discover a new image of what surrounds us.

Since very ancient times, Man has created images: symbolic, they have had a religious and/or political character since the first civilizations.

As the story progresses, Man, like a good Narcissus, seeks to represent himself as faithfully - no, as idealized - as possible.

In the West, painting and sculpture become the preferred medium for historical events: great battles, biblical or ancient episodes, portraits of powerful people... nourish the images and allow posterity to remember faces and names.

With the appearance of photography, painting gradually lost its role as a direct witness to history. It was also during the same period that abstraction appeared in European art.

1. Birth of abstraction: new references for new forms.

We cannot understand abstraction without placing it in context. The end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries saw numerous technological developments.

The most important is photography which liberates painting and allows it to explore form, material, color, without pretext, without the rigid conventions imposed for centuries by academicism. With the European colonial presence in the world, Europeans and their artists discovered exotic arts, such as African and Polynesian arts whose styles, whose symbolic and geometric representations are the antipodes of the age-old conventions of European art.

Figure 2: Mbangu mask. Central pendants. Bandundu, Zaire.

Figure 3: Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, MOMA, NY

Artists allow themselves new, freer appreciations of forms. Picasso thus ended up with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907.

Figure 4: Georges Braque, Violin and candle, 1910

In this work, which marks the beginning of Cubism, Picasso seeks to bring out the pure form of bodies: cubes, cylinders and pyramids are the fundamentals of Cubist aesthetics. Artists used straight lines and sharp angles to represent the contours of objects, emphasizing geometry. Cubism - also developed by Georges Braques - also seeks to bring the subject back in front of the viewer by bringing the perspective towards the foreground. Cubism introduced the notion of “multiple view” or “simultaneous perspectives”. Artists represented objects by combining different views and perspectives in a single image, creating a fragmentation of space and time.

The artist's point of view, his eye, gives the work its singularity. In the same way, flat areas of color move away from artistic blurs to exploit the specific resonance of color, in a limited palette.

At the same period (from 1909-10), Futurism was born in Italy. Here, the reference is modernity, the machine, speed. Founded by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, futurism rejected the artistic conventions of the past.

Figure 5:Luigi Russolo, Luigi Russolo Automobile in corsa, 1912 - 1913

Marinetti urged artists to celebrate technology, the machine and speed, and to create works that reflected the energy and dynamics of modern life. This movement's links with Italian fascism lie in their ideological convergence, particularly with regard to their vision of modernity, national power and the centralization of power. Benito Mussolini was a fervent admirer of futurism. He saw in futurist ideals a correspondence with his own political aspirations.

However, although some futurist artists expressed support for fascism others maintained a critical distance from Mussolini's regime.

Figure 6: by Umberto Boccioni, Unique forms in the continuity of space, 1913, bronze

2. Pure geometric form: the work of Kazimir Malevich

Geometric form is essential to approaching the shapes of nature. When we learn to draw, we approach a face as an oval, the direction of an arm as a line… moving in space. These are what we call the lines of force, which allow us to construct the work: here for example, a Deposition from the Cross by Caravaggio and the Oath of the Horatii by David.

Figure 7: Caravaggio, Deposition from the Cross, 1602-1604

Figure 8: Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1785

Everything is geometry and yet… abstraction was born neither in Italy nor in France but in the northern and eastern countries, in Russia with Malevich and Kandinsky (for the best known) and in Holland with Mondrian.

Let's start with Malevich, he's my favorite.

Russia, unlike the rest of Europe, is Orthodox. There, art does not copy Nature but the divine nature of Christ. Indeed, the icons are the “photographic” image of Christ and the Virgin: legend has it that Luke, quite incapable of capturing the essence of the divine, was helped by angels descended from heaven to complete his work. This is what we call an “acheiropoietic” image, that is to say, “not made by human hands”. Conceived in this way, the art of the icon remains fixed.

Figure 9: Unknown author, Christ, around 1100

Figure 10: unknown author, Vladimir Icon, circa 1100

This art is deeply rooted in spirituality and religious symbolism. Icons are designed to convey theological and spiritual concepts through symbolic motifs: for example the mandorla, an almond shape which surrounds the figure, represents the divine glory which surrounds the sacred figures, symbolizing the light of divinity which emanates from the saints .

This symbol, like other geometric symbols, such as circles, triangles and stars are also essential in the overall composition of the work.

The body, and what constitutes nature, responds to geometric rules. Malevich's figurative works show this well: the body is a cylinder, the figure an oval, etc.

We see in these figured works the same rigid framework as that of the icons: shapes, proportions, geometries of the body take root in Orthodox religious art.

Figure 11: Kazimir Malevich, Hay Cutter, 1930

Figure 12: Kazimir Malevich, The Sportsmen, 1928-1930

Figure 13: Kazimir Malevich, Woman at the Red Post, 1932-1933

Figure 14: Kazimir Malevich, Girl with a Comb in Her Hair, 1932-1933

Like icons, Malevich supports his compositions with bright colors and marked contrasts between light and shadow. These visual effects are used to create a spiritual and mystical atmosphere, as well as to emphasize the importance of symbolic elements in the image.

Figure 15: Kazimir Malevich, Yellow and Black Suprematism, 1916

By exploring form and symbol, Malevich and his contemporaries moved further and further away from figuration. Freeing yourself from the constraints of the academic form, that is to say officially supported by the State, also means freeing yourself politically from Tsarist Russia. The communist revolution will support these avant-gardes before oppressing them to return to a “Soviet realism”, propaganda images far removed from the formal and intellectual freedom of abstraction.

Abstract art is not just a view of the mind: it is the long work of an age-old tradition, mixing spirituality, plastic questions, questions about representation and the nature of reality. The exploration of form as such, freed from the “flourishes” of realistic representation, is a space which revisits reality and which reveals its source: pure form and color.

3. Abstraction and nature: the example of Piet Mondrian

One of the leading figures in abstract art is Piet Mondrian. Dutch painter born in 1872 into a Calvinist family, began his career in the artistic era which then dominated: realism and neo-impressionism.

His area of ​​influence is different from our friend Malevich. Dutch art is mysterious and mystical, imbued with many symbols linked to nature. One of its key themes is the mill.

Figure 16: Piet Mondrian, Mill in the Twilight, 1907-1908

Windmills represent the passage of time and the transition between seasons. They are sometimes depicted in peaceful rural landscapes, evoking a sense of calm and contemplation, and symbolizing continuity and the perpetual cycle of life. The mill, indirectly, represents the wind which is the Spirit and its breath, the manifestation of a higher consciousness.

Figure 17: Piet Mondrian, Bosque en Oele, 1908

Figure 18: Piet Mondrian, Still Life with a Ginger Pot II, 1912

Futurism and Cubism, which emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, influenced the young painter who gradually turned towards a purification of forms.

Figure 19: Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1916

Figure 20: Piet Mondrian, Composition in black and white, 1915

To do this, Mondrian accentuates lines and geometric shapes such as rectangles and squares. He traces the points of convergence between the lines of force, which has the effect of creating small crosses.

Little by little, geometry replaces the figurative. Mondrian also chooses a limited color palette: the primary colors, yellow, blue and red, from which all colors can be created.

Returning to the “primary”, to the “first”, to the “primitive” was the fashion of the time thanks to the discovery of African and Polynesian arts. Painters focus on the pure expression of painting rather than the faithful representation of reality made possible through photography.

Thus our dear Piet concentrates on lines and planes, in a search for harmony, accentuated by the affixing of colored surfaces. Everything creates a dynamic balance.

Mondrian managed to achieve pure abstraction, where his works express universal artistic and spiritual principles rather than specific representations of visible reality.

Figure 21:: Piet Mondrian, Composition, circa 1920

Figure 22: Piet Mondrian, Composition, circa 1920

Figure 23:: Piet Mondrian, Composition, circa 1920

It is this universalism that geometry and abstraction allow: by appropriating the underlying forms of nature, abstraction tends towards the universalism of representation.

This is possible because there is a universal rule or rather, a universal language: mathematics. It is geometry that orders Nature.

We all know fractals, complex geometric shapes that repeat at different scales, like in ferns for example. The arts of Islam have reproduced this order to manifest divine Creation.

For those who are interested in art, you probably know the Fibonacci sequence which is a mathematical sequence of which the shapes of seashells or certain flowers are the most beautiful expression. Some also know this sequence as the “golden ratio”.

The same in the cosmos: planetary orbits follow elliptical trajectories around their stars obeying the laws of gravitation and celestial mechanics set out by Kepler and Newton.

The universe itself exhibits remarkable symmetry. Structures such as galaxy clusters, cosmic filaments, and large bubble-like structures observed in the distribution of galaxies reveal complex geometric patterns that often challenge our understanding.

Taking the forms of Nature, art deduces sacred interpretations: the square, which has a beginning and an end, represents the earth, finitude. The circle, which has neither beginning nor end, is synonymous with eternity, totality, continuity and harmony.

Among Christians, it represents the divine: the crowns are round just like the halos. The triangle can symbolize dynamics, movement and energy. In some cultures it is associated with concepts like heaven, earth and man, or past, present and future, ternary thinking, the Trinity etc.

Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian explored art at its most fundamental elements: color, shape and line. These artists sought to express emotions, ideas or abstract concepts through their art, thus freeing painting from any representational constraints.

Abstraction has known different phases and schools, ranging from geometric abstraction, characterized by pure geometric shapes and clean lines, to lyrical abstraction, which favors gestural spontaneity and emotional expression.

Over time, abstraction has influenced many artistic fields, including painting, sculpture, photography, music, and even architecture. It has also opened new avenues of artistic exploration, challenging traditional notions of representation and beauty, and inviting the viewer into a more subjective and immersive aesthetic experience. Today, abstraction remains a dynamic and diverse artistic movement, continually explored and reinterpreted by contemporary artists.