Abstract art is painting or sculpture that does not set out to depict a recognizable person, place, or object. Instead of asking a viewer to identify what is being shown, it builds its meaning out of the elements painting has always used underneath any picture — color, line, shape, texture, the physical fact of paint on a surface — and lets those elements carry the work’s full weight on their own. That distinction sounds simple, but it took the Western tradition several centuries of increasingly loosened representation, from Impressionism’s dissolving brushwork to Cubism’s fractured perspective, before any painter fully let go of the recognizable subject and asked whether a picture needed one at all.
Credit for that final step usually goes to Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian-born lawyer turned painter working in Munich in the years before the First World War. Kandinsky kept an untitled watercolor study in his studio that he later dated to 1910 and described as his first fully abstract work — a tangle of loose, unanchored color and line with no legible object underneath it. Art historians have since found reason to doubt that date; the paper and the handling both suggest Kandinsky may have made it closer to 1913, and simply back-dated it once he wanted to claim priority as abstraction’s inventor. The record is further complicated by Hilma af Klint, a Swedish painter who had already been producing large, fully abstract compositions since 1906 as part of a private, spiritually motivated project she called Paintings for the Temple. Af Klint worked in near-total secrecy and left instructions that the paintings not be shown until twenty years after her death, so she had no influence on the movement as it actually developed — but she is a reminder that “who got there first” is a messier question than the standard textbook account allows.
What matters more than the exact date is the argument Kandinsky built around the practice. In his 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he proposed that color and form could act on a viewer directly and psychologically, the way a chord or a melody acts on a listener, without needing to first pass through the recognition of an object. Music, after all, moves people without depicting anything; Kandinsky wanted painting to claim the same freedom. That same year he and Franz Marc founded the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group in Munich, a loose circle of painters pursuing color’s expressive and near-spiritual force. Kandinsky’s Composition VII, an enormous 1913 canvas now in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, is usually treated as the fullest statement of that ambition — a churning, large-scale field of clashing color and gesture that art historians have connected to Kandinsky’s private, half-hidden references to apocalypse and resurrection, deliberately dissolved past the point of legibility.
Once the door was open, painters across Europe walked through it in very different directions. In Russia, Kazimir Malevich pushed abstraction toward its most austere extreme with Suprematism, unveiled in December 1915 at an exhibition in Petrograd where his Black Square hung across the corner of the room traditionally reserved, in Russian homes, for religious icons. Malevich’s manifesto for the movement, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, argued for a painting built from pure geometric form on an unmodulated ground, stripped of any remaining trace of the visible world. In the Netherlands a few years later, Piet Mondrian arrived at a comparably reductive vocabulary from the opposite temperament: a grid of black lines and flat primary color he believed expressed a universal harmony beneath the accidents of appearance, developed alongside the De Stijl group he helped found.
Abstraction’s center of gravity shifted again after the Second World War, this time to New York, where a loose generation of American painters — Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Clyfford Still, and Robert Motherwell among them — became known as the Abstract Expressionists. The group split, in practice, into two overlapping tendencies. Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline are usually grouped under “action painting,” in which the physical record of the artist’s gesture — a dripped skein of paint, a slashing brushstroke — became the actual subject of the canvas. Rothko, Still, and Barnett Newman worked instead toward what’s called color field painting: large, hovering expanses of saturated color, largely free of visible brushwork, built to be experienced almost physically at close range rather than read as a composition of parts.
None of that history is required to get something out of standing in front of an abstract painting, but it helps to know what you’re actually looking for, since there’s no hidden picture to decode. Scale matters first — a color field painting meant to fill your peripheral vision reads very differently in a photograph than it does at six feet. After that, look at the literal surface: is the paint thin and fast, or built up in slow, deliberate layers; does a stroke look repeated a hundred times or made once and left alone? Watch how the colors behave next to each other — whether a red advances toward you while a blue recedes, whether two tones fight or settle into balance — and notice any rhythm across the canvas, points where a pattern breaks or repeats. Above all, treat your own response as real information rather than a problem to solve. An abstract painting doesn’t withhold a meaning you’re failing to find; like a piece of music, it offers a direct experience that doesn’t require translation into words to be legitimate.
That may be the reason abstraction never really receded after its mid-century peak the way some art-historical styles do once their moment passes. A painting organized around illustrating a particular fashionable subject dates quickly; a painting organized around the internal logic of its own color and form keeps generating new readings, because it was never pinned to a single moment’s visual references in the first place. It remains, more than a century after Kandinsky, one of the most widely practiced idioms among working painters — not as a historical style to revive, but as an open set of tools for exploring what paint, color, and gesture can do without any obligation to depict anything at all.
If any of this makes you want to see the ideas at work rather than just read about them, Art Fair carries a changing selection of original abstract paintings from artists working in the tradition today, worth browsing with exactly the kind of close, unhurried looking described above.
