Abstract

Abstract is an art genre. The gallery holds 3,068 works in this genre, including works by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin.

Abstract art is art with a degree of independence from the visual references of the world, abandoning the depiction of recognizable objects in favour of an autonomous language of colour, line, shape and gesture. It crystallized across Europe in the years around 1910–1913, as a generation steeped in the dismantling of appearances by Post-Impressionism, Cézanne, Fauvism and Cubism pushed toward a complete break with representation. The impulse was as much spiritual as formal: many pioneers, drawn to Theosophy and to the analogy of music — which moves listeners without imitating anything — sought a pictorial equivalent for inner states. Wassily Kandinsky gave the movement its founding theory in his 1911 treatise "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," and his works were among the first non-objective paintings exhibited publicly; the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, working privately, had already begun her abstract "Paintings for the Temple" in 1906. Within a few years František Kupka, Robert Delaunay and Francis Picabia were exhibiting abstractions of their own.

From the outset abstraction split into two broad currents. One is lyrical and expressive, treating colour and line as direct carriers of emotion, as in Kandinsky's "Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II)" of 1912 — shown at the 1913 Armory Show and now in the Metropolitan Museum — where embracing couples dissolve into surging, serpentine masses. The other is geometric and reductive: Kazimir Malevich proclaimed Suprematism with his "Black Square" (1915), a "zero point of painting," while Piet Mondrian distilled his Neoplasticism to black grids and primary colours. Mondrian's path is instructive — his early naturalist canvas "Oostzijdse Mill along the River Gein by Moonlight" shows the landscape painter he was before he abstracted nature into pure relation.

The principal figures — Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich, Kupka, Delaunay and af Klint — were soon joined by artists who hovered between abstraction and the legible world, among them Paul Klee, whose luminous, stained-glass "Temple Gardens" (1920) dates from his Bauhaus years, and Fernand Léger, whose tubular, machine-age forms in works like "The Village" grew out of Cubism. Their legacy is immense: channelled through De Stijl, the Bauhaus and Constructivism into modern design and architecture, and revived after 1945 by the Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock foremost among them. Abstraction remains less a single style than the defining grammar of modern art.