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.

Painting that represents nothing was new to European easel painting around 1910, but pattern without a picture is very old. Islamic art, which in religious settings avoided images of people and animals, developed geometric ornament of great sophistication: interlocking stars and polygons on the walls and ceilings of mosques and palaces such as the Alhambra in Granada, built from a few rules of symmetry repeated and varied. Textiles across the world, from Andean weaving to West African kente cloth, have long used bands, grids and blocks of colour for their own sake.

The pioneers of 1910 knew some of this. Kandinsky was fascinated by Russian folk art, and European artists had been looking hard at objects from Africa and Asia in museum collections for years. What made their work different was not the absence of a subject but the setting and the claim: a framed canvas, hung on a gallery wall and meant to be contemplated on its own, asserting that shape and colour alone could carry the meaning once carried by saints and landscapes. Ornament decorates something else; abstract painting asks to be the thing itself.

Abstraction did not stay in frames. Alexander Calder hung shapes of painted metal from wires so that they turned and rebalanced in moving air, and Marcel Duchamp named them mobiles in the early 1930s; they made the idea of composition something that changed from minute to minute. Barbara Hepworth carved stone and wood into smooth forms pierced with holes, so that the empty space became part of the sculpture. In Houston, the Rothko Chapel, opened in 1971 after the painter's death, surrounds visitors with dark canvases in an octagonal room built for them.

Abstraction also leaked into ordinary life faster than many people realise. The Bauhaus school in Germany taught that grids, primary colours and simple geometric forms could shape furniture, typography and buildings as well as paintings. In 1965 Yves Saint Laurent showed shift dresses printed with Mondrian-style grids of black lines and coloured blocks. Much modern graphic design, from posters to company logos, works by the principles the pioneers explored: balance, contrast and the weight of a shape on a flat surface. Someone who says they dislike abstract art usually lives surrounded by its descendants.

Abstract paintings have a right way up, even when it is hard to see, and one famous case shows how easily it can be lost. Piet Mondrian's New York City I, made in 1941 from strips of coloured adhesive tape, was first shown in New York in 1945, after his death, and later went to a museum in Dusseldorf. In 2022 a curator there concluded that it had been hung upside down the whole time. A photograph of Mondrian's studio showed the work on an easel the other way round, and the lines bunch together at what should be the top, like a darkening sky above a city.

The museum chose not to turn it, because the old tape is fragile and might come loose, but the episode shows how much orientation changes the way a composition feels. Kandinsky told a related story about himself: coming home at dusk, he saw a picture of extraordinary beauty glowing on his studio wall, made of nothing but shapes and colours, and then realised it was one of his own paintings standing on its side. You can test the effect by rotating a reproduction of an abstract work on screen. Weight that felt settled at the bottom suddenly seems to hang or press, and the balance falls apart.

Abstract art became political in ways its pioneers never planned. The Nazis attacked modern art as a symptom of decay, pressured the Bauhaus into closing in 1933 and stripped German museums of works by Kandinsky, Klee and many others. In 1937 they mounted an exhibition in Munich called Degenerate Art, hanging confiscated works haphazardly beside mocking slogans, and it drew enormous crowds. In the Soviet Union the turn was just as sharp: in the 1930s socialist realism became the official style, abstraction was condemned as bourgeois formalism, and Malevich spent his last years painting recognisable figures again.

In the Cold War the meaning flipped once more. To American officials, the large, individual canvases of Pollock and his circle could stand for the freedom the Soviet system denied, and in the 1950s exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism toured Europe. Former intelligence officers later confirmed that the CIA had secretly funded cultural organisations that promoted such work abroad, though how much difference this made to the painters' success is debated. The irony is that at home some American politicians denounced modern art as communist, and a State Department touring exhibition of modern paintings was cancelled in 1947 after attacks in Congress and the press.

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.