Abstract art

What is abstract art and where to find examples

This article attempts to explain the modern art movement of "Abstract Art", what it represents, the key players who have molded the art movement and where to find examples of Abstract art.

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The Abstract Art movement started in the 1940s and started to decline in it's presence in the 1960s. It was regarded by many as the golden age of American art. The movement is marked by its use of brushstrokes and texture, the embracing of chance and the frequently massive canvases, all employed to convey powerful emotions through the glorification of the act of painting itself.

The idea of Abstract art was to reduce form down to its foundations and in turn represent an image through abstraction. The boundaries of what is classified as abstract art has becomed blurred with the succession of other abstract related movements such as abstract expressionism and minimalism.

The key players in abstract art were:

Barnett Newman:

The son of Polish immigrants, Newman studied at New York City's Art Students League (1922-26) and at the City College of New York, from which he graduated in 1927. He worked in his father's clothing business in the 1930s and gradually began painting full-time. With the painters William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, he cofounded the school called, 'The New York School' which held open sessions and lectures for other artists. Newman evolved a style of mystical abstraction in the 1940s and achieved a breakthrough with the canvas in which a single stripe of orange vertically bisects a field of dark red. This austerely geometric style became his trademark.

Jackson Pollock:

Paul Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son of Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock, who were both of Scotch-Irish extraction (LeRoy's original surname was McCoy before his adoption about 1890 by a family named Pollock) and born and raised in Iowa. The family left Cody, Wyoming, 11 months after Jackson's birth; he would know Cody only through family photographs. Over the next 16 years his family lived in California and Arizona, eventually moving nine times. In 1928 they moved to Los Angeles, where Pollock enrolled at Manual Arts High School. In 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1938, which caused him to be institutionalized for about four months. After these experiences, his work became semiabstract and showed the assimilation of motifs from the modern Spanish artists.

Piet Mondrian:

Was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major exponent of the Dutch abstract-art movement known as (“The Style”). In his mature paintings, Mondrian used the simplest combinations of straight lines, right angles, primary colours, and black, white, and gray. The resulting works possess an extreme formal purity that embodies the artist’s spiritual belief in a harmonious cosmos.

Mark Rothko

American painter whose works introduced contemplative introspection into the melodramatic post-World War II Abstract Expressionist school; his use of colour as the sole means of expression led to the development of colour field painting.

You can find examples of abstract art as well as information on other art movements and artists by clicking here: abstract art