A brief history of abstract art

A brief history of abstract art would have to begin with Pablo Picasso. Picasso was the world’ greatest innovator and his work spanned the first half of the twentieth century. His work began with representational work and as his life progressed he became more interested in colors and forms and less on the images.

Picasso began abstraction by fragmenting his images according to how he felt about them. His pictures would evolve as his thoughts changed, giving a more primitive result. This led to the movement of cubism. Picasso’s pictures became more geometric in their emphasis on angle and fragmented two dimensional space. Palettes became more monochromatic, as well. He derived this from Cezanne, who emphasized relying on the cylinder, the cube and the sphere to make paintings.

Another painter in Picasso’s company was Georges Braque. The two worked together a great deal, even spending one summer painting together. They took cubism further by adding numbers and letters to the pictorial space. These remained “flat” paintings with the emphasis on the shallow surface of the painting, leaving perspective behind as a concern. The creation of cubism progressed very quickly and painters from other countries began using this new vision also, among them Fernand Leger, and Juan Gris.

Leger was a frenchman and he was very intelligent and produced not only paintings but written feelings about the new work. He likened abstract painting to freedom that is enjoyed by saints and heroes. Juan Gris was a Spaniard and he came to Paris, penniless in 1906. He worked as a cartoonist to purchase the bare minimums of life. He worked with planes and textures and his paintings had great visual interest.

Taking his own vision of the cubist movement was Marcel Duchamp. He became a group of painters that became known as futurists. They were interested in industrialization, the new military might being wielded in the world. There is a lot of movement in the futurists’ work and the colors tend to be metal-like and monochromatic. Another futurist who had a great deal of interest in movement in his work was Umberto Boccioni. His sculptures were human-like but also had abstracted forms moving about the basic form. His sculpture: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is considered the height of futurism.

About this time, art began knowing no borders, and Paris was no longer the only center for work. Other European countries began their own artists cultures, including Russia,