Early abstraction for beginners: art without objects

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

For thousands of years, nearly all painting showed something: a god, a person, a place, an apple. Then, within a few years before and during the First World War, several artists in different countries painted pictures of nothing you could name. Many of them did it for the same surprising reason. They were not rebelling against meaning. They were trying to paint the spirit. Abstract art was born partly in séance rooms and Theosophical lodges.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The legends. Modern How we see it now.

Thought forms

Historical In 1901 the Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater published Thought-Forms, with color plates showing what they believed emotions and thoughts looked like on the astral plane: clouds, spirals and rays of color. Several pioneers of abstraction knew this kind of writing. I cover Hilma af Klint, who began her abstract Paintings for the Temple in Stockholm in 1906, in lesson 7 of the course.

Kandinsky

Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons), 1913. Art Institute of Chicago (1931.511). Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Historical Wassily Kandinsky (1866 to 1944) believed colors have an inner sound. His book Concerning the Spiritual in Art appeared in late 1911, dated 1912, and names Madame Blavatsky. Improvisation No. 30 (Cannons) (1913), in Chicago, still has cannons and buildings in it, but they are dissolving into pure color. A watercolor in Paris long called the first abstract painting and dated 1910 is now dated 1913 by the Centre Pompidou.

Kupka and Orphism

Historical The Czech painter Frantisek Kupka (1871 to 1957) worked as a spiritualist medium as a young man in Prague and Vienna. In Paris in 1912 he exhibited large abstract paintings of circles and planes. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire called the color abstraction of Robert and Sonia Delaunay “Orphism”, after Orpheus, the mythical singer. Sonia Delaunay carried it into fabrics and fashion.

Malevich’s Black Square

Historical In December 1915, at an exhibition in Petrograd called 0,10, Kazimir Malevich hung a painting of a black square high in the corner of the room, where Russian homes placed an icon. He called his art Suprematism, the supremacy of pure feeling. He had read P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (1911), about the fourth dimension and higher consciousness. In 2015 researchers found a racist joke written under the paint, a reminder that even icons have messy histories.

Mondrian and De Stijl

Piet Mondrian, Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray, 1921. Art Institute of Chicago (1957.307). Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Historical Piet Mondrian (1872 to 1944) joined the Theosophical Society in 1909. Over the next decade his trees became grids, and by the 1920s his paintings were black lines and primary colors, like this diamond-shaped Lozenge Composition (1921) in Chicago. He saw them as a balance of opposites, a picture of universal harmony. In 1917 he and Theo van Doesburg founded the journal De Stijl.

The esoteric angle

Historical At the Bauhaus school in Germany (1919 to 1933), the teacher Johannes Itten followed Mazdaznan, a religion mixing Zoroastrian ideas with diet and breathing, and began classes with breathing exercises. In 1937 the Nazis attacked abstract art as degenerate.

Later tradition For decades, museums told abstraction as a story of pure form, leaving out the spirit. A 1986 exhibition in Los Angeles, The Spiritual in Art, helped put it back.

Modern See also esoteric art.

Try it yourself

Without drawing any objects, paint or color three small squares: one for calm, one for anger, one for hope. Use only color, line and shape. Show them to someone without the labels. Can they guess which is which?

Before and after

Before this: Futurism.

After this: Dada.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.