The History of Abstract Painting
Abstraction in painting involves the portrayal of an image in such a way that it only partially references the real world. Abstraction as a practice came about as the result of a natural progression in art, moving from the treatment of the canvas as a portal into reality, to the near opposite: art for art's sake. The history of abstract painting is a history of artistic movements whose synthesis produced a variety of abstract methods.
Painting Immediacy
The events that directly led to abstract painting began in the mid-19th century with the Impressionists. The Impressionists were a group of artists (including Monet, Manet, Renoir and Degas) whose major goal was to capture commonplace subjects as they existed in real-time: transient, changing and according the painter's immediate impressions.
The Impressionists were among the first artists to take their work out of the studio, often painting subjects on location. The results of this were relatively unrefined, focusing on the essence of the subject rather than the finished results. The paintings emphasized light and motion. Impressionist painters used techniques that involved short, visible brush strokes with little color mixing to add to the immediacy of the painting and viewing experience.
Painting Emotions
Around the turn of the 20th century, a group of German painters (influenced partly by the Impressionists) began painting in a style that was visceral, textural and colorful. Although the paintings were similar to the Impressionistic genre in that they were unconcerned with painting carefully posed images with smooth, invisible brush strokes, the basis of these paintings was emotional rather than physical. This movement was called Expressionism, and it represented a clear departure from the studied portrayal of subjects of the pre-Impressionist movements.
The works of the Expressionists opened the door to artistic movements that made successively greater departures from representation of the physical world. This progression led to Cubism.
Abstraction
Cubism is often what springs to mind when "abstract art" is discussed in everyday conversation. Cubism as a movement began in the early 20th century with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Cubist paintings broke their subjects down into geometric figures that were studied, distorted and displayed in a mock-three dimensional presentation that in no way resembled actual three-dimensional reality. This radical departure from representation of the physical world caused a snowball effect that changed the way artists painted thereafter, causing more artists to experiment with more creative methods of painting, eventually culminating with non-representational art, or that is, art for art's sake.
Departure From Representation
A non-representational painting is a painting that does not reference the real world at all--there is no "subject." In non-representational painting, paint is applied to the canvas in a manner deemed appropriate by the artist. Some famous painters who have painted in this manner include Mondrian, Pollock, Rothko, Newman and Motherwell.
Non-representational art was made famous by the Abstract-Expressionists in the 1950s, when a group of painters calling themselves the New York School made a radical departure from somewhat representational to entirely non-representational images. These artists caused a flurry of activity in the art world that quickly led to different styles of non-representational art and non-representational movements.
Abstract Art Today
Today, "abstract art" is a generic term that doesn't reference any one kind of art or any one specific artistic movement. Abstract art encompasses any art that may be made without tight ties to physical reality. It may reference physical reality or it may be non-representational. The artistic freedom that painters have today is a result of the efforts of artists in all the movements leading up to abstract art: the Impressionists, the Expressionists, Cubists and non-representational painters.
