by Brooke Wolfe

Created on: April 08, 2009   Last Updated: April 09, 2009

Modern Abstraction in Art

Modern Abstraction arose during a time of war and artistic revelation. Many were disgusted with its apparent lack of content and rationality yet the great abstract firsts had great content in their work, whether considered purely abstract or not; and this content ran in themes throughout abstract styles themselves as well as past movements which influenced the two types of abstraction.

It is a very difficult task to define exactly what abstract art is and more difficult yet to categorize the ambiguous degrees of abstraction. For the purposes of this paper it will not be necessary to delve into the many philosophical discussions which surround this term, but instead to use the generally accepted definition; abstraction is unconcerned the visual world. This simplified definition covers many artistic movements in art a many artists claim to have reached a pure abstraction before a true disconnection with the visual world had been made. Paul Gaugin claimed that his self portrait of 1888 is "absolutely incomprehensible because it is so abstract." The same year the young Paul Serusier achieved some level of abstraction when he painted a landscape by a lake all the wrong colors and titled it The Talisman. Indeed the first break from direct visual experience in this modern period is with these artists as well as other symbolists and expressionists like Van Gogh, Kirchner, and Czanne. Though Ernst Kirchner and Die Brucke show little indication that they painted true abstraction; they nonetheless along with these other early moderns helped set the visual and linguistic standards for the "pure" abstract artists to come. The time from which abstraction sprung is also generally considered to have occurred, and not accidentally, around World War one.

Abstraction becomes obscure if not enough so already, when theorists try to classify it. Abstraction is not its own movement within itself but it does incorporate into groups and movements such as Dada, Blaue Reiter, expressionism, neo plasticism, futurism, symbolism, surrealism, orphism, and cubism. Within these movements there are certainly two basic categories of abstraction, object-derived and non-object-derived. Object-derived, or abstraction from nature, began very early as already seen in Paul Serusier. Wassily Kandinsky started to abstract from nature in his early Munich works but moved into the non-objective or abstraction from the spirit. Among those who abstracted from the spirit painted either

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