Elger:Abstract Art

Abstraction shook Western art to its core. At the beginning of the 20th century, it broke away from the dictates of clear, indisputable norms, radically departing from any form of naturalism and confronting the viewer with an unprecedented new art, devoid of any conventional, representational imagery. Artists from various styles found their own individual paths to abstraction, making this term a collective designation for styles that, like Cubism, abstracted from real objects or actually became entirely non-representational art—such as Constructivism and Suprematism, both of which originated in the Russian avant-garde.

Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, Color Field Painting, Tachisme-Informel, Op Art, Automatism, Concrete Art, Conceptual Art, Minimalism—these all belong to abstract art, where only form, line, color, and movement matter, structure and composition take center stage, and only the artist's freedom counts.

This introduction showcases the full spectrum of abstract art. From early Cubism and Futurism to Op Art and Minimalism, it traces the paths and forms that non-figurative art explored and traversed from the early 20th century to the 1960s. It presents Jackson Pollock's Action Painting, Piet Mondrian's geometric forms, Kazimir Malevich's black square, and Wassily Kandinsky's complex compositions, as well as works by Picasso, Klee, Kline, and Rothko, alongside pieces by less prominent figures such as Antoni Tàpies, K.O. Götz, Ad Reinhardt, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.