What Is Abstract Art? Painting That Stopped Pretending to Be a Window

The move was gradual. Photography, from the 1840s, took over the job of recording appearances, and painters began asking what painting could do that a camera could not. The Impressionists dissolved outlines into light; Cezanne reduced landscapes to planes and cylinders; Van Gogh and Gauguin used colour for feeling rather than accuracy. The Cubists, from 1907, broke objects into facets seen from several angles at once, and by 1911 a Cubist portrait was very nearly a pattern of brown shapes with a moustache somewhere in it.

The last step, removing the moustache, was taken by several people at about the same time. Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Kazimir Malevich in Russia, Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands, Frantisek Kupka in Paris and, it emerged decades later, the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, who had been making large abstract canvases since 1906 and ordered them kept from public view until twenty years after her death.

None of the pioneers believed they were painting nothing. Kandinsky, a trained musician, argued that colours and forms act on the viewer as sounds do, directly, without needing to represent anything, and titled his works Composition and Improvisation. Malevich painted a black square on a white ground in 1915 and hung it across the corner of the room where Russian homes placed their icons; he called the style Suprematism and meant it as a new starting point for feeling, freed from the weight of objects. Mondrian reduced painting to horizontal and vertical lines and the three primary colours, and believed he was revealing the universal order beneath the visible world.

The theories were mystical, and the paintings outlived the theories. What survives is the discovery that a painting can hold a viewer's attention, and move them, through balance, tension, rhythm and colour alone, the way music does without words.

The centre shifted to New York after 1945. The Abstract Expressionists worked on a scale no easel could hold. Jackson Pollock laid canvases on the floor and dripped and flung paint across them in dense skeins, so that the painting recorded the movement of his body; Mark Rothko stacked soft-edged rectangles of colour that seem to breathe and that viewers regularly weep in front of; Willem de Kooning kept figures half visible inside a storm of brushstrokes. Critics divided them into action painting and colour field painting, and both were read as the expression of an individual self in a way the European pioneers, with their universal orders, had not intended.

The 1960s reacted. Minimalists such as Frank Stella and Agnes Martin stripped out gesture and emotion in favour of grids, stripes and plain surfaces, with Stella's remark that what you see is what you see as the manifesto. Since then abstraction has been one option among many rather than a movement, practised alongside figuration and often by the same artists.

Standing in front of an abstract painting, the useful move is to stop searching for the subject and start noticing what the painting is doing to your eye. Where does it go first, and where is it sent next? Does the composition feel balanced or about to tip? Are the colours fighting or resting? How was the paint put on, thinly, thickly, fast, slow, and what does the surface tell you about the hand that made it? How big is it, and how does the size change how it feels to stand there? Those questions have answers, and the answers are the content.

It helps to know that abstract painters are usually working with the same tools as figurative ones, composition, colour theory, contrast, rhythm, only without the alibi of a subject. A Rothko is organised as carefully as a Vermeer. A viewer who knows what to look for in a landscape already knows what to look for in a Mondrian. The questions to bring:

• •Where does the eye enter, and what path does it take?
• •What is the largest contrast, of colour, of size, of texture?
• •Is the surface flat and even, or does it show the making?
• •Does the painting feel still, or in motion, and why?
• •What does the scale do: intimate, or overwhelming?

The standing complaint is that a child could do it. For much abstract art, technically, a child could not; Mondrian's lines took weeks to adjust and Rothko's colours are built from dozens of translucent layers. But for some of it, technically, a child could, and the point was never technique. Malevich's square was not hard to paint. It was hard to think of, and to hang in the icon corner, and to defend. Abstract art shifted the question of what makes a painting good from how well it copies the world to what it does with the means of painting, and that question, a century on, is still the one modern art asks.

Abstract art is painting and sculpture that depicts nothing recognisable, developed around 1910 by artists who believed colour and form could act on a viewer directly, taken to a heroic scale by the Abstract Expressionists after 1945, and pared back by the Minimalists. It is looked at by asking what the work does with balance, colour, surface and scale rather than what it shows.