Abstract art developed in the late 19th century as artists felt a need for a new art form that reflected the fundamental changes in technology, science, and philosophy. It uses forms, colors, and lines instead of attempting to represent recognizable reality. In the 20th century, several movements contributed to abstract art becoming more removed from visual references, including Romanticism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. Artists like Kandinsky and Mondrian were also influenced by Eastern and occult philosophies. During this time, abstract art developed in Russia, Germany, France, and the United States. It became an international art movement as artists fled Europe during World War II and spread abstract styles around the world.

1. Abstract art
Art that does not attempt to represent external, recognizable reality but seeks to achieve its effect using shapes,
forms, colors etc.

2. Introduction
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition
which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the
world.[1] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th
century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an
illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become
accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By
the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which
would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and
philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments
were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of
Western culture at that time.[2]
Abstract art, nonfigurative art, nonobjective art, and nonrepresentational art are
loosely related terms. They are similar, but perhaps not of identical meaning.

3. Abstraction in early art and many cultures
Much of the art of earlier cultures – signs and marks on pottery, textiles, and
inscriptions and paintings on rock – were simple, geometric and linear forms which
might have had a symbolic or decorative purpose.[5] It is at this level of visual meaning
that abstract art communicates. One can enjoy the beauty of Chinese
calligraphy or Islamic calligraphy without being able to read it.

4. 19th century
Three art movements which contributed to the development of abstract art
were Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism
Early intimations of a new art had been made by James McNeill Whistler who, in his painting Nocturne in Black and
Gold: The falling Rocket, (1872), placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than the depiction of objects
Expressionist painters explored the bold use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations, and intense
color. Expressionists produced emotionally charged paintings that were reactions to and perceptions of contemporary
experience; and reactions to Impressionism and other more conservative directions of late 19th century painting
Additionally in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe mysticism and early modernist religious philosophy as
expressed by theosophist Mme. Blavatsky had a profound impact on pioneer geometric artists likeWassily Kandinsky,
and Hilma af Klint. The mystical teaching of Georges Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky also had an important influence on
the early formations of the geometric abstract styles of Piet Mondrian and his colleagues in the early 20th century.

5. 20th century

6. Music
Visual art, as it becomes more abstract becomes more like music: an art form which uses the
abstract elements of sound and divisions of time. Wassily Kandinsky, himself a musician, was
inspired by the possibility of marks and associative color resounding in the soul. The idea had
been put forward by Charles Baudelaire, that all our senses respond to various stimuli but the
senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level.
Closely related to this, is the idea that art has The spiritual dimension and can transcend 'every-
day' experience, reaching a spiritual plane. The Theosophical Society popularised the ancient
wisdom of the sacred books of India and China in the early years of the century. It was in this
context that Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint and other artists working towards
an 'objectless state' became interested in the occult as a way of creating an 'inner' object. The
universal and timeless shapes found in geometry: the circle, square and triangle become the
spacial elements in abstract art; they are, like color, fundamental systems underlying visible
reality.

8. Russian avant-garde
Many of the abstract artists in Russia became Constructivists believing that art was no longer
something remote, but life itself. The artist must become a technician, learning to use the tools
and materials of modern production. Art into life! was Vladimir Tatlin's slogan, and that of all
the future Constructivists. Varvara Stepanova and Alexandre Exter and others abandoned easel
painting and diverted their energies to theatre design and graphic works. On the other side
stood Kazimir Malevich, Anton Pevsner and Naum Gabo. They argued that art was essentially a
spiritual activity; to create the individual's place in the world, not to organise life in a practical,
materialistic sense. Many of those who were hostile to the materialist production idea of art
left Russia. Anton Pevsner went to France, Gabo went first to Berlin, then to England and finally
to America. Kandinsky studied in Moscow then left for the Bauhaus. By the mid-1920s the
revolutionary period (1917 to 1921) when artists had been free to experiment was over; and by
the 1930s only socialist realism was allowed.

9. The Bauhaus
The Bauhaus at Weimar, Germany was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius.[24] The philosophy
underlying the teaching program was unity of all the visual and plastic arts from architecture
and painting to weaving and stained glass. This philosophy had grown from the ideas of
the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the Deutscher Werkbund. Among the teachers
were Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers,Anni Albers, Theo van
Doesburg and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In 1925 the school was moved to Dessau and, as the Nazi
party gained control in 1932, The Bauhaus was closed. In 1937 an exhibition of degenerate art,
'Entartete Kunst' contained all types of avant-garde art disapproved of by the Nazi party. Then
the exodus began: not just from the Bauhaus but from Europe in general; to Paris, London and
America. Paul Klee went to Switzerland but many of the artists at the Bauhaus went to
America.

11. Abstraction in Paris and London

12. America: mid-century
During the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s many artists fled Europe to the
United States. By the early 1940s the main movements in modern art,
expressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism, and dada were represented in
New York: Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz, Max
Ernst, André Breton, were just a few of the exiled Europeans who arrived in
New York.[28] The rich cultural influences brought by the European artists
were distilled and built upon by local New York painters. The climate of
freedom in New York allowed all of these influences to flourish. The art
galleries that primarily had focused on European art began to notice the
local art community and the work of younger American artists who had begun to
mature. Certain of these artists became distinctly abstract in their mature
work.

13. Abstraction in the 21st century

14. Causation

15. The End.