Abstract Art! Definition, Types, Characteristics e Objective

Abstract Art

Abstract Art is a non-objective art, which does not have an accurate representation of a visual reality, but uses Forms, Colors, Textures and Gesture Marks to achieve its effect. It was born at the beginning of the 20th century and was completely radical for its time.

Some may even say that abstraction started with cave paintings from thousands of years ago, Abstract Art represents an artistic break from traditional molds, that was the main feature.

Abstract art has been around for over 100 years. Artists began to create simplified objections with little or no reference to the “real” world.

The modern abstract art that we know today can be attributed to impressionism, post-impressionism and cubism. All three helped to realize the idea that art might not be representative.

The first artist to create abstract art as we know it was Wassily Kandinsky.

He is often credited by historians as “The Father” of abstract art for creating paintings in floating, non-representational forms since 1912. His work brought abstraction to America during the Armory Show in 1913.

Sensitive or informal Abstractionism

Feelings and emotions predominate. Colors and shapes are created freely. In Germany comes the movement called “Der blaue Reiter” (The Blue Knight) whose founders are the Kandinsky, Franz Marc among others.

An abstract art, which puts color and shape into its greatest expressiveness.

These artists delve into chromatic research, achieving spatial and formal variations in painting, through the tones and hues obtained. They want an abstract, sensitive and emotional expressionism.

With form, color and line, the artist is free to express his inner feelings, without relating them to the memory of the outside world. These elements of the composition must have a unity and harmony, just like a musical work.

Best Abstract Artists:

Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944

Russian painter, considered by many historians to be the “Father of Abstract Painting”, but before abstractionism he participated in various artistic movements such as impressionism also went through a short fauve and expressionist phase.

He wrote books, as in 1911, on the spiritual in art, in which he sought to point out symbolic correspondences between the inner impulses and the language of shapes and colors, and in 1926, from the point and the line to the surface, a more technical explanation of the construction and inventiveness of your art.

Dozens of his works were confiscated by the Nazis and several of them were exhibited in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition.

Franz Marc 1880-1916

A German painter, passionate about the art of primitive people, children and the mentally ill, Marc chose animal studies as his favorite themes, met Kandinsky, under the influence of him, convinced himself that the essence of beings is revealed in abstraction.

The admiration for Italian futurists gave a new dynamic to Marc’s work, which started to use shapes and masses of bright colors typical of Cubist painting.

Tachisme

Tachisme appeared in the post-World War II period, in Europe, with the intention of breaking with previous models of art. The movement’s name comes from the French tache, which means stain.

Formed by spots created impulsively with all the freedom or emotional effusion of the artist. Lyrical Tachismo shows luminous, transparent and spontaneous tones. Dramatic Tachism has dark, serious, passionate tones.

The paintings of that period value spontaneous gesture, the artist’s instinct at the time of production.

It is possible to imagine, when looking at the painting, the movements that the artists made. An important artist who represents this type of painting is Hans Hartung.

This type of abstraction is also called informal abstraction, in the sense that it does not have a defined shape.

The raw material used for the painting was also explored. Some artists gave more priority to gesture and others to research the material, creating textures, layers and using new materials.

Best Abstract Artists:

Jean Dubuffet 1901 – 1985

French painter who was inspired by the art of children and crazy people.

His works had irregular shapes and simple designs.

He went in search of new art forms and found what he called raw art: made by people who are not part of the artistic environment, who do not have cultural and historical references about art and seek ideas and themes within themselves, such as children, crazy and lonely people.

Geometric Abstraction

It is the geometric abstract art that had a lot of influence from the cubist and futurist movements. This is due to the use of geometric shapes and with a more rational and hard feature in the representations. Therefore, the lines and colors are organized in a way that results in a mostly geometric composition.

As this aspect emerged shortly after the formal discoveries of cubism, it had several currents, some that deserve to be highlighted. Among them: Suprematism; Constructivism; Neoplasticism or De Stijl, Concretism, Neoconcretism.

Best Abstract Artists:

Piet Mondrian 1872-1944

Dutch pioneer of abstract art, who developed from the beginning of the landscape to abstract geometric works of the most rigorous type. His canvases were painted from pure, vivid colors and straight lines.

The painter’s desire was to obtain as much clarity as possible and, for that, he sought that the canvases reflected the mathematical laws of the universe. It was not by chance that the patterns of the painting were always regular, precise and stable. He moved to New York in 1940, where he began to develop a more colorful style, with colored lines. and syncopated rhythms.

Action Painting

It is production of improvised and gestural ‘drip paintings’, placing your canvas on the floor and pouring paint over it from the can or dragging it by brush or stick.

This type of painting does not have previous schemes, and appeared in New York, in the 1940s, under the influence of surrealist automatic painting processes.

Best Abstract Artists:

Jackson Pollock 1912-1956

He is an American painter, he introduced a new modality in the technique, dripping the paints that drip from punctured containers intentionally, in a fast execution, with abrupt and impetuous gestures, spraying, staining, painting the chosen surface with extraordinary and fantastic results, sometimes realized before the public.

He developed research on aromatic painting

In the last works in this line, the artist used materials such as nails, shells and pieces of canvas, mixed with the layers of paint to give relief to the texture. He often used industrial paints, many of which are used in car painting.

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

He was a Dutch painter who left Holland at the age of 22 on board a freighter, started his life as a carpenter and wall painter.

Unlike his avant-garde colleagues, who abolished the figurative representation of his paintings, female figures – the mark of difference in his work.

In the late 1940s, along with Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko, revolutionary American painting, founding the abstract expressionist avant-garde.

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