abstract art essay

Abstract art

Abstract art is art that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead uses shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect

Wassily Kandinsky Cossacks (1910–1) Tate

Strictly speaking, the word abstract means to separate or withdraw something from something else.

The term can be applied to art that is based on an object, figure or landscape, where forms have been simplified or schematised.

It is also applied to art that uses forms, such as geometric shapes or gestural marks, which have no source at all in an external visual reality. Some artists of this ‘pure’ abstraction have preferred terms such as concrete art or non-objective art , but in practice the word abstract is used across the board and the distinction between the two is not always obvious.

Abstract art is often seen as carrying a moral dimension, in that it can be seen to stand for virtues such as order, purity, simplicity and spirituality.

Since the early 1900s, abstract art has formed a central stream of modern art .

Abstraction across a century

Juan Gris Bottle of Rum and Newspaper (1913–14) Tate

Sonia Delaunay Electric Prisms 1913

Orphism (1912–13): Coined by the French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire. The name comes from the musician Orpheus in ancient Greek myths, as Apollinaire thought that painting should be like music. Main artists Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay also used the term simultanism to describe their work of this period.

Kazimir Malevich Dynamic Suprematism (1915 or 1916) Tate

Naum Gabo Model for ‘Construction in Space ‘Two Cones’’ (1927) Tate

The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams / Tate, London 2023

Theo van Doesburg Counter-Composition VI (1925) Tate

Joan Miró Painting (1927) Tate

© Successió Miro/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002

Morris Louis Alpha-Phi (1961) Tate

© The estate of Morris Louis

Cubist and fauvist artists depended on the visual world for their subject matter but opened the door for more extreme approaches to abstraction. Pioneers of ‘pure’ abstract painting were Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian from about 1910–20. A pioneer of abstract sculpture, which took reference from the modern world was the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo .

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Selected artists working with abstraction

Piet mondrian, the first abstract artist (and it's not kandinsky).

Wassily Kandinsky is generally regarded as the pioneer of abstract art. However, a Swedish woman called Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) might claim that title

Fahrelnissa Zeid

Wassily kandinsky, lászló moholy-nagy, bottle and fishes, pablo picasso, dame barbara hepworth, david bomberg, ben nicholson om, mark rothko, howard hodgkin.

There are many theoretical ideas behind abstract art. While some have taken the idea of 'art for art’s sake' (that art should be purely about the creation of beautiful effects), others have proposed art can or should be like music, in that just as music is patterns of sound, art’s effects should be created by pure patterns of form, colour and line. The idea, derived from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, that the highest form of beauty lies not in the forms of the real world but in geometry, is also used in discussion of abstract art, as is the idea that abstract art, since it does not represent the material world, can be seen to represent the spiritual.

Explore this term

Abstraction sans frontières.

Éric de Chassey

The show at Tate St Ives this summer explores the international context which shaped the work of artists in the Cornish town from the 1940s to 1960s. As Éric de Chassey writes, the broad exchange of ideas was not limited to American artists such as Rothko and de Kooning, but extended to French painters such as Nicolas de Staël, which would also reflect a shared interest in nature and landscape

Optimistic abstraction

Gavin Delahunty

The curator of the forthcoming exhibition by the German abstract painter introduces her work, and a fellow artist pays homage

Chance and Intention: Gerhard Richter’s Abstractions

In this talk art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh looks in great detail at Richter’s responses to painters like Lucio Fontana, Jean Fautrier, and Robert Rauschenberg in 1962

Abstract Connections conference audio recordings

Audio recordings of Abstract Connections conference, held in conjunction with two major exhibitions, Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World and Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at Tate Modern.

Coral and Lichen, Brains and Bowels: Jay DeFeo’s Hybrid Abstraction

Catherine Spencer

Situating the US artist Jay DeFeo within a network of West Coast practitioners during the 1950s and 1960s, this essay shows how her relief paintings – layered with organic, geological and bodily referents – constitute what can be understood as ‘hybrid abstraction’. This has affinities with ‘eccentric abstraction’ and ‘funk art’, but also resonates with the socio-political context of Cold War America.

Abstraction Across Media: David Smith conference audio recordings

Audio recording from the conference Abstraction Across Media: David Smith, with Anne Wagner (University of California, Berkeley), David Anfam (Phaidon Press), Alex Potts (University of Michigan), Jeremy Lewison and Rebecca Smith, daughter of the artist

Related Movements

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted

Fauvism is the name applied to the work produced by a group of artists (which included Henri Matisse and André Derain) from around 1905 to 1910, which is characterised by strong colours and fierce brushwork

Suprematism

Name given by the artist Kazimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913 characterised by basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colours

Constructivism

Constructivism was a particularly austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915

An early form of abstract art characterised by interacting linear forms derived from rays of light

Simultanism

Term invented by artist Robert Delaunay to describe the abstract painting developed by him and his wife Sonia Delaunay from about 1910

Term used to describe the non-geometric abstract art that developed in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s characterized by spontaneous brushwork, drips and scribble-like marks

Neo-plasticism

Neo-plasticism is a term adopted by the Dutch pioneer of abstract art, Piet Mondrian, for his own type of abstract painting which used only horizontal and vertical lines and primary colours

Concrete art

Concrete art is abstract art that is entirely free of any basis in observed reality and that has no symbolic meaning

Objective abstraction

The term objective abstraction refers to a non-geometric style of abstract art developed by a group of British artists in 1933

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterised by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity

Minimalism is an extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s and typified by artworks composed of simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle

Post-painterly abstraction

Post-painterly abstraction is a blanket term covering a range of new developments in abstract painting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, characterised by a more rigorous approach to abstraction

Op art was a major development of painting in the 1960s that used geometric forms to create optical effects

Related Techniques & approaches

Non-objective art.

Non-objective art defines a type of abstract art that is usually, but not always, geometric and aims to convey a sense of simplicity and purity

Art informel

Art informel is a French term describing a swathe of approaches to abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s which had in common an improvisatory methodology and highly gestural technique

Also known as art informel, art autre translates as 'art of another kind' and was used to describe the dominant trend of abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s characterised by an improvisatory approach and highly gestural technique

Gestural is a term used to describe the application of paint in free sweeping gestures with a brush

In art, automatism refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process

Related Groups

Abstraction-création.

Abstraction-Création was an association of abstract artists set up in Paris in 1931 with the aim of promoting abstract art through group exhibitions

American Abstract Artists (AAA)

American Abstract Artists (AAA) is an organisation founded in 1936 to promote the appreciation of abstract art in the United States

De Stijl was a circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals

Penwith Society of Arts

Penwith Society of Arts is an artists' society formed in 1948 at St Ives, Cornwall, Britain by artists working in an abstract style

Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square)

Cercle et Carré was an artist group formed in Paris in 1929 which strongly supported new developments in abstract art and in particular promoted mystical tendencies within it

Réalités nouvelles

The Salon des Réalités nouvelles (new realities) was an exhibiting society devoted to pure abstract art founded in Paris in 1939

The Seven and Five Society

Formed in London in 1919 The Seven and Five Society was initially a traditional group and can be seen as a British manifestation of the return to order that followed the First World War

Bauhaus was a revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919

Abstract Art at Tate

A view from são paulo: abstraction and society.

Explore how geometric abstraction fabricated dreams of a new society in the twentieth century 

Be mesmerised by the kaleidoscopic paintings of the international female artist, Fahrelnissa Zeid

Albers and Moholy-Nagy: from the Bauhaus to the New World

Albers and Moholy-Nagy: from the Bauhaus to the New World pas exhibition at Tate Modern

Malevich exhibition at Tate Modern, opens 16 July 2014

Mondrian and his Studios

Mondrian and his Studios, is a new exhibition opening 6 June at Tate Liverpool exploring the artist's relationship with architecture and urbanism

Rothko at Tate Modern 26 September 2008 – 1 February 2009

Essays on Abstract Art

RENEE PHILLIPS - MENTOR FOR ARTISTS

Helping Artists Achieve Their Fullest Potential

Writing About Your Abstract Art

By Renee Phillips 2 Comments

Most artists I know find writing artist’s statements very difficult. One might agree that for artists who work in the style of realism, it is an easier task to communicate their inspiration because they are dealing with tangible and natural references. However, if you’re an abstract artist the challenges are very different. How do you convey to others how you feel when choosing your colors, shapes, forms and techniques? The myriad of internal, intangible forces may be difficult to articulate.

For this article let’s take a look at several different abstract artists and what I have written about their art and their statements. I hope these examples offer some guidance when writing about your abstract art.

I love to write about art and artists. If you would like me to write an Art Review in which I write about the strengths and unique qualities about your art,  visit this page.

Karen Johnston Writes About Soft Textures and Brilliant Tones

Karen Johnston, studiokarenjohnston.com, lives in Nashville, Tennessee and refers to herself as an intuitive, abstract painter. She won a Featured Artist Membership Award in the Healing Power of Art & ARTISTS “Art That Lifts Our Spirits” exhibition. We asked artists to submit, along with their JPEG images, a 60-word statement. This requirement poses the challenge for them is to be as clear and concise as possible. As you can imagine, some artists rise to the task with success and it separates the artists who have a clear vision of the kind of artist those who don’t.

For her award-winning submission Karen wrote, “Lingering on interior moments and bringing them to life with soft gestures and brilliant tones is the essence of my work. My joy of nurturing emotion until it rises to the heights of hope and light radiates from my canvases. Touches of whimsy, intuitive marks, and passages of color lyrically combine in my abstract narratives to poetically inspire the spirit.”

Eva Breitfuß Transports Us and Raises Consciousness

Eva Breitfuss, known as Eva Breitfuß, evabreitfuss.space, is a contemporary artist whose paintings transport us on an enthralling, multi-dimensional, visceral journey of transcendent self-discovery.

A profusion of abstract styles culminates in her versatile artistic vocabulary. She orchestrates minimal and reductive imagery and open spaces as well as geometric shapes, detailed designs, and intricate compositions. Every line, color and shape she chooses reflects a purposeful intention to communicate conceptual breadth and depth.

With unerring prowess, Eva lures us into spacious orbits, curvilinear forms, concentric circles, undulating waves and crossing directional lines. Her images release an exalted crescendo and emanate a profound vibrational energy.

You can read a complete Art Review I  wrote on The Healing Power of ART &  ARTISTS website

Britt Michaelian Creates Transcendent Paintings Infused With Healing Energy

Britt Michaelian is a contemporary abstract painter and a quintessential artist/healer. Her transformative paintings are infused with spiritual intuition and healing modalities. They emanate a universal and eternal presence of equilibrium, tranquility, and restoration.

The large enveloping scale of Britt’s paintings embraces us with an immersive and transcendent presence. They conceptualize invisible yet visceral forces inherent in the inner and outer worlds of our existence.

As an artist she applies her depth of knowledge and extensive creative skills anointed with her love for helping others heal. It is worth noting that Britt has a master’s degree in art therapy which contributes to her creative vision.

Read an Art Review I wrote on The Healing Power of ART & ARTISTS website.

Steevie Jane Parks Unites the Healing Dynamics of Colors and Forms

Steevie Jane Parks creates awe-inspiring, multi-layered abstract paintings. She is highly proficient in applying the dynamics of color theory and integrates a range of hues with organic and curvilinear elements. Her art combines her many artistic skills with intuition and engages viewers visually and viscerally.

Steevie’s vibrant painting “Creativity” awakens our inner spirit. Symbolic forms and contrasting colors emphasize dynamism and intensity. The mesmerizing glowing forms conjure visions of stained glass and kaleidoscopes.

Biomorphic elements also enliven many of Steevie’s paintings. However, they transcend their physical details in favor of illuminating their intrinsic essence. Her animated references to patterns from the natural world are often inspired by painting  en plein air .

Would You Like Me to Write An Art Review About Your Art?

I love to write about art and artists. if you would like me to write an art review in which i write about the strengths and unique qualities about your art, visit this page., more articles to help you write your artist’s statement.

How to Write Your Artist’s Statement Art and Artist’s Statements – Quotes by Famous Artists Quick Tips For Writing Your Artist’s Statement Write Your Artist’s Statement in 60 Words or Less Follow The 5 P’s When Writing Your Artist’s Statement Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Your Artist’s Statement Fun Techniques to Help You Write Your Artist’s Statement

About Renee Phillips

Renée Phillips is a mentor and advocate for artists helping them achieve their fullest potential. She provides career advice, writing services, and promotion for artists from beginners to advanced. She organizes online exhibitions as Director/Curator of Manhattan Arts International www.ManhattanArts.com and Founder of The Healing Power of ART & ARTISTS www.healing-power-of-art.org. As an arts' advocate she has served on the advisory boards of several non-profit arts organizations. She lives in New York, NY.

04/02 at 8:39 am

Was happy to see Michael Amrose’s input. I love his work. Bought one several years ago and still ‘am in love’. Brings out a lot of meditative and spiritual feelings.

08/16 at 7:51 pm

Great article, so sorry I did not know about it.

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My specialty is writing Art Reviews and Art Statements / "Praise Quotes" for artists to use for promotion... on their websites, social media profiles, exhibition catalogues, grant submissions, blog posts, press releases, artists’ books and more. My writing for artists has led to increasing their art sales, attracting publicity, gaining … More...

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KANDINSKY AND ABSTRACTION: THE ROLE OF THE HIDDEN IMAGE

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Kandinsky’s determination to communicate a messianic vision led him to search for a “spiritual” form freed from representational elements which he considered materialistic. Although he envisioned abstraction as having the most potential for the expression of his antimaterialistic values, he feared that neither artists nor spectators would be able to grasp its “meaning” and would see it as mere decoration. Consequently, he worked with veiled and stripped imagery as a means of developing an abstract style which would not lose its power to communicate its message to the uninitiated.

Reaching the spectator was a major goal for Kandinsky, for he believed that man stood at the threshold of a new spiritual realm and that the arts would, through the stimulation of the senses, lead mankind to this new age. In his major theoretical tract of the period, Concerning the Spiritual in Art , published in 1912, Kandinsky explained that art was “one of the most powerful agents of the spiritual life,” a “complicated but definite movement forward and upward.” 6 He viewed all of his efforts of this period as steps toward achieving this goal. In his autobiography of 1913, for example, he clearly stated that Concerning the Spiritual in Art and the almanac, Der Blaue Reiter , were conceived for the explicit purpose of awakening the “capacity, absolutely necessary in the future, for infinite experiences of the spiritual.” 7 He repeatedly wrote that he wanted his works of art to “klingen,” to sound, so that they would send “vibrations” into the human soul and help to elevate the human spirit. Kandinsky’s wish to use all the means at his disposal to communicate his ideas even led him to experiment with a stage composition during this period. He felt that a stage work incorporating music, poetry, painting, and dance, which he called the “monumental art work,” would have a greater possibility of reaching the minds of his audience since those who were only capable of responding to one of the arts would more easily become involved, 8 or, as Kandinsky would express it, “vibrated.” However, he devoted his major efforts before the First World War to painting, and he ended Concerning the Spiritual with the optimistic statement that the type of painting he envisioned would advance “the reconstruction already begun, of the new spiritual realm . . . the epoch of great spirituality.” 9

Steiner’s prophecies must have seemed a continuation of many of the apocalyptic notions prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century. Many of the French and Russian Symbolists and those in their circle to whom Kandinsky had been exposed since the late nineties, 15 had written of the need for a new spiritual era. For. example, the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev, whom Steiner admired, prophesied before his death in 1903 that the apocalyptic expectations of St. John would soon occur. 16 Moreover, since 1906, Steiner had been friendly with the French Theosophist, Edouard Schuré, whose books, Les grands initiés in particular, were studied by many of the painters and writers associated with French Symbolism. Schuré, in addition, had been involved in the nineties with the theatrical experiments of the Rosicrucian group of Sar Peladan, whom Kandinsky praised in Concerning the Spiritual .

Kandinsky’s contact with Steiner’s Christian Theosophy and his interpretation of the Revelation to John, 17 may be responsible for Kandinsky’s increasing use of religious motifs from 1909 to 1914, 18 at a time when he was also becoming increasingly interested in abstraction. Beginning late in 1909, Kandinsky started to use apocalyptic images in paintings to which he frequently gave clear eschatological titles, 19 such as Horsemen of the Apocalypse , Deluge , All Saints’ Day , Last Judgment , and Resurrection . He used the terms “Last Judgment” and “Resurrection,” or awakening of the dead, interchangeably. These works contain a number of similar motifs such as angels blowing trumpets, figures rising from their graves, cities falling, lightning, which correspond to the description of the day of judgment in the Revelation to John. 20 The number of works with these religious motifs and titles reached its height during 1911. During that year, Steiner was especially active in Munich forming an organization called Johannes-Bau-Verein to support his theatrical productions, and Kandinsky, working in Munich and Murnau, was involved with the collection of material for the almanac, Der Blaue Reiter , which he and Franz Marc were editing, 21 in addition to preparing the manuscript of Concerning the Spiritual for publication. In both works Kandinsky indicated that his concept of the spiritual rested on a new interpretation of Christianity, one not tied to established religion which he felt had abandoned its responsibility. The Christian emphasis, not dominant in Kandinsky’s works before 1909, can easily be seen when one compares the cover of Concerning the Spiritual , with its apocalyptic overtones, to a membership card Kandinsky designed earlier for an artists’ association formed in 1909. In the card for the Neue Künstlervereinigung, a fairy tale ambience and not a religious one, dominates, whereas the cover of Concerning the Spiritual derives from the center of a glass painting of 1911, which takes its title from the Russian words for Resurrection written on the preparatory sketch. The motif on the cover is quite simplified but the outline of a mountain topped by a city with falling towers and a horse and rider can be identified if one compares it to the motif in the center of the glass painting. The Christian overtones evident in Concerning the Spiritual are also apparent on the cover of the Blaue Reiter almanac which, like the essay, was compiled to “awaken the spiritual.” The prophetic mood of religious conversion can be sensed when one analyzes the source from which the cover was derived. This cover, based on a glass painting derived from the Bavarian folk images of St. George and St. Martin, 22 who were associated with the conversion of heathens through their good deeds, reflected the similarity Kandinsky and Marc saw between their goals and those of the early Christians.

At times, Kandinsky’s use of apocalyptic and Christian imagery has been attributed to an interest in 15th-century German Bible illustration and in the Bavarian folk paintings on glass prevalent in Germany before the First World War. Attributing Kandinsky’s choice of motifs to a purely esthetic interest in the formal aspects of such works ignores his overriding messianic outlook and his Russian background. 23 It seems more likely that folk art attracted him as a means of expressing his messianic intent, for he felt folk art was “purer” than western art of the academic tradition. In some way, he equated the artist’s study of folk, primitive, and Gothic art with the Theosophical study of hypnosis and mesmerism, for both groups were seeking knowledge in areas not previously admired by the establishment. That Kandinsky’s primary interest was not in the formalistic aspects of primitive art is reflected in his attempt to obscure the motifs which he borrowed from earlier styles. He felt that a style from another age not transmit his message for it had to be clothed in a form which grew out of his generation’s experience. Believing that each period of culture produced its own art, Kandinsky maintained that if artists were to be effective they should reflect the mood of their day, which he described as one of conflict, contradiction, dissonance, and confusion. But at the same time he felt artists should be able to point to the future with their works. 24 Consequently, Kandinsky could not be satisfied with imagery as clearly defined as that in Resurrection , where the bent tower and clouds of the central motif are derived, for example, from a 15th-century woodcut for the Nuremberg Bible. 25 For the cover of Concerning the Spiritual , Kandinsky hid the central motif from Resurrection to such a degree that the imagery and the theme are barely recognizable. Hiding the imagery, then, was a way in which Kandinsky could create a mood of confusion, and yet also use the image to help lead one out of the initial confusion, thereby suggesting hope for the future. This is the logical basis for the remnants of imagery based on apocalyptic motifs that persisted in Kandinsky’s work even as he moved ever closer to abstraction during this period.

We find that although Kandinsky gave only a few works religious titles after 1911, he still retained motifs, albeit largely hidden, which related to those in his titled religious paintings. In paintings such as Composition V of 1911 or Composition VI of 1913, he indicated in essays that the imagery of trumpets, angels, and boats, were not merely formal solutions but were included because the theme of Composition V had its origin in the Resurrection, or the awakening of the dead, and Composition VI had been suggested by the Biblical flood. 26 In these large oils the imagery is not easily perceived. However, usually one motif, such as the trumpet in Composition V , helps to bring the rest of the imagery into focus. Even those paintings with religious titles after 1911 seem to have no discernible imagery until one finds a key motif. For example, the 1912 glass painting, Last Judgment , begins to come into focus only when one concentrates on the black outlined trumpet in the upper right. When this work is compared to an earlier painting, such as Resurrection of 1911, even more of the nondelineatory lines take on specific forms; the curved black lines in the upper center suddenly come into focus as the outline of a mountain topped by a walled city with falling towers. The themes of most of the paintings from 1912, 1913, and 1914, which had neither title nor written description, can be clarified when the works are compared to earlier paintings.

Although Kandinsky believed that color could have the same emotional intensity as music, could communicate thought, and that line could suggest dancelike motion, he maintained that color and line alone could not be the basis for the development of an abstract style. As he explained in Concerning the Spiritual , artists as well as spectators needed reference points from the external world; otherwise, the use of pure color and independent form would result in “geometric decoration, resembling something like a necktie or a carpet.” 27 In his autobiography of 1913, he wrote of the great demands that an abstract art would make on the spectator. Consequently, he urged artists to lead the spectator into the abstract sphere step by step, balancing abstract forms with barely perceptible signs. He suggested that objects could be transformed into these hidden signs and could become an additional means of causing a vibration. In Concerning the Spiritual , which contains the most extensive discussion of how the object could have an evocative power similar to that of pure color and form, Kandinsky explained that a combination of veiling the object with ambiguous shapes and colors and also stripping the object into a skeletonlike outline, or construction (as he did for the cover motifs) would create a “new possibility of leitmotivs for form composition.” 28 He proclaimed: “It is not obvious (geometrical) constructions that will be richest in possibilities for expression but hidden ones, emerging unnoticed from the canvas and meant definitely for the soul rather than the eye.” 29 Small wonder then that the 1924 biographer might have seen “trees, water, fog” and was genuinely bewildered by Kandinsky’s insistence in 1919 that his first “abstract” work bore a date of 1911. Of course, even in 1919 Kandinsky did not claim that he painted only abstract works in 1911, but many critics nonetheless refused to allow themselves to see imagery in Kandinsky’s paintings after that date. As late as September of 1913, in an essay called “Painting as Pure Art,” Kandinsky continued to emphasize that the first step toward a “pure art” was the “replacement of the corporeal [object] with the construction.” 30

Kandinsky’s concept of the hidden image as a means of achieving this first step has certain-parallels with Steiner’s ideas about how knowledge of the “higher worlds” should be communicated. Since Steiner believed that the uninitiated could not directly experience the “spiritual world” where colors and forms floated in space, he suggested that those who hoped to reach out to the layman must begin with something tangible, with physical matter. Although Steiner stressed that the artist or seer use myth, sagas, similes, and comparisons to begin their instructions, he advised that directions not be too clear. He believed that hidden and ambiguous suggestions would be the most powerful. He felt that if the student had to decipher the message, he would reach a new understanding in the process. In the preface to one of his books, Steiner warned the reader that every page would have to be “worked out” if the reader wished to experience the message of the book. 31 Influenced by Symbolist theories, Steiner believed that the indirect rather than the direct would lead the way to the spiritual world. 32

Although Steiner may have reinforced Kandinsky’s antinaturalist orientation and although his emphasis on the Revelation of John may have offered Kandinsky a myth or saga upon which he could base his message of struggle and redemption, Steiner’s own artistic efforts were rather heavy-handed and did not offer Kandinsky a model for solving the artistic problems he felt. Instead, Kandinsky drew upon the Symbolist esthetic itself, 33 with its emphasis on the suggestive, the mysterious, and the indirect, for a solution to the conflict that grew out of his desire to reduce representational elements in his paintings without having the resulting shapes degenerate into meaningless geometric patterns. The Symbolist theory of language, which emphasized that words could create a strong emotional impact if their literal meanings were disguised, provided Kandinsky with a theoretical basis for hiding and veiling the objects in his paintings. A belief in synesthesia allowed Kandinsky to transfer a theory formulated for poetry and drama to the visual arts; it allowed him to believe that he could give to the visual object the evocative power the Symbolist poets and dramatists gave to words.

Although the Symbolist concept of language found coherent expression in many individuals, the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck is the only Symbolist to be discussed at length in the text of Concerning the Spiritual . Not only did Kandinsky cite three of Maeterlinck’s plays and one essay, but he stated that his approach to language held “great possibilities for the future of literature.” 34 Maeterlinck, who was praised by Kandinsky for expressing the transcendental through artistic means, was also highly regarded by Steiner, who described his work as one of the most “distinguished experiences of the modern soul.” 35

Maeterlinck, who had been attentive to the ideas of the French Symbolist poets in addition to the theories of numerous universalist cults such as the Rosicrucians, Theosophists, and Swedenborgians, popular in the nineties in France, 36 emphasized in his writings that a new language and a new type of theater were needed to enable men to experience the transcendental in their daily lives. Kandinsky called Maeterlinck a clairvoyant and a prophet because he felt the dramatist’s use of ambiguity and mystery in his plays and poems reflected the anxieties and turmoil of his age. In Concerning the Spiritual Kandinsky devoted considerable space to an analysis of Maeterlinck’s use of words to manipulate moods “artistically.” Maeterlinck, Kandinsky stressed, removed the external reference from words by constant repetition and by dislocation from the narrative. Kandinsky translated Maeterlinck’s suggestions for the dematerialization of words into his own proposal for the dematerialization of objects, writing: “Just as each spoken word (tree, sky, man) has an inner vibration, so does each represented object.” 37 He proposed to simplify the object to a residual, organic form which would have the same evocative effect as the symbolic word by placing the object in an unusual context, by hiding its external form beneath veils of color, or by stripping it to a construction. Just as the word could be used for its sound in addition to its notational value so did Kandinsky believe that the residual object could be used to reinforce the effect of pure color and pure form. If the object were hidden, that is if the object became indirect, the inner vibration would be stronger.

Painters connected with Maeterlinck and other Symbolists helped to reinforce Kandinsky’s faith in the power of the hidden. He could study the paintings of Denis and Redon, both of whom he admired, 38 and examine how they used color and a loose brushstroke to dematerialize their images. Certainly in the actual development of Kandinsky’s style, these painters, in addition to Matisse, are far more important than any of the Theosophical drawings of “thought forms” which have been suggested as key influences in the evolution of Kandinsky’s abstraction. 39

While Theosophical drawings may not have had much influence on Kandinsky’s stylistic development, Steiner’s messianic program and his insistence on providing keys to the spectator through myth, seems to have led Kandinsky to use images of an apocalyptic nature in his paintings. The Symbolist admiration for the mysterious and the ambiguous, in addition to Steiner’s emphasis on the indirect, most likely moved Kandinsky to the use of barely perceptible images combined with nondelineatory colors and forms as a means of leading the observer into the spiritual realm.

The interaction of Symbolist and Theosophical ideas in Kandinsky’s development before the First World War is particularly evident in his experiments with stage compositions, which incorporated music, dance, painting, and poetry. Although none of his plays were performed and only one, Der gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound), was published in the Blaue Reiter almanac, 40 the theater seemed to stand next to painting in Kandinsky’s interests. While Kandinsky’s fascination with the possibilities of a “total art work” based on a stage composition may have originally developed from seeing and reading the work of Wagner 41 —the hero of many Symbolist groups—Steiner’s adoption of Wagner’s idea that the theater should be the focus for the creation of a religious art” must have strengthened Kandinsky’s desire to experiment with stage composition. Kandinsky could easily have seen one of the “mystery” dramas of Steiner and Schuré, which Steiner produced in Munich between 1907 and 1913. Indeed, one of Kandinsky’s friends, Emy Dresler, worked on the set designs for these productions. 43 Both Steiner and Schuré used chorus, music, a rudimentary color symbolism, and a ritualized narrative in their theatrical productions.

Interestingly, certain motifs in Kandinsky’s one published stage composition, The Yellow Sound , resemble motifs in Steiner’s and Schuré’s plays. The most striking similarity is the transformation, with the aid of lights, of one of the major characters, a giant, into an enormous cross at the conclusion of Kandinsky’s stage composition. This is very similar to the conclusion of a Schuré play, performed in Munich in 1909, where a cross is placed in the center of a star, the basic Theosophical sign, thereby suggesting the absorption of all wisdom and religions into his Christianized version of Theosophy. And in a Steiner drama of 1911, a character described as a “representative of the spirit” was placed nine feet above the stage with arms extended to suggest a cross. 44

While Kandinsky’s experiments with a “total art work” have numerous sources, all of those who influenced his productions seemed interested to some degree in the religious possibilities of the drama. Maeterlinck is no exception. However, Maeterlinck’s dramas with their abandonment of plot, narrative action, and conventional scenery were undoubtedly the primary inspiration for Kandinsky’s avoidance of linear narrative and scenery, his use of indistinct words, and the erratic, puppetlike movements of the main characters in The Yellow Sound . 45

Moreover, all those who influenced Kandinsky’s experimentation with works combining the various arts were believers in theories of the correspondence of the senses. Such theories were popular at the end of the 19th century not only among the Symbolist groups in France and Russia, but also among psychologists and various occult groups such as the Theosophists. The belief that one means of stimulating the senses could be substituted for another, and that in certain persons the stimulation of one sense would set off the stimulation of all the others, was accepted by Maeterlinck as well as by Steiner and Schuré. Kandinsky, however, unlike many of the Symbolists and Theosophists and even those experimenters among his contemporaries such as Scriabin who related color to music, did not believe that his stage work combining the various arts should depend on parallel or reinforcing stimuli (bright colors supported by loud music). He felt a stronger expression of his ideas could be achieved if the various arts were used contrapuntally. For example, if in The Yellow Sound the colored lights were to be very intense, Kandinsky indicated that the music should subside. For Kandinsky, the repetition of parallel stimuli was in some sense like naturalism, a 19th-century device—it could in no way suggest the conflict and disharmony which he felt were present in the 20th century. In this respect, the Austrian composer, Arnold Schönberg, who wrote an essay for the Blaue Reiter on non-parallelism between text and musical accompaniment, exerted some influence on Kandinsky’s movement away from a simple and harmonious use of parallel correspondence in his works. 46

Kandinsky’s paintings of this period, like his stage composition, are based on the principle of using as many different stimuli as possible to multiply the vibrations emanating from the canvas. Kandinsky often spoke about color as equivalent to music, of line as equivalent to dance, and of objects as equivalent to words. Here we find one more reason why Kandinsky would write that the object must be used in a painting: “To deprive oneself of this possibility of causing a vibration would be reducing one’s arsenal of means of expression.” 47

Even in 1913 when Kandinsky began to feel he was closer to abstraction, the transformation of apocalyptic motifs into hidden constructions are quite evident in his paintings. In Small Pleasures (known also as Little Pleasures ), for example, whose title stands in ironic counterpoint to its contents, the motifs and their arrangement are similar, although much more veiled, to those in the clearly titled religious works of 1911. Although at first glance Small Pleasures may not appear to have Religious signs, close examination of this painting and the glass painting upon which it is based, reveal a general scheme of a mountain, topped by a walled city, in the center of the work, and a boat tossed by stormy waves to one side of the mountain, a scheme which is similar to the arrangement of motifs in the glass painting, Resurrection . Moreover, the three horse and riders clearly outlined in black in the glass painting of Small Pleasures , but simplified to a few incomplete lines veiled by layers of color in the oil, are derived from a glass painting that Kandinsky called Horsemen of the Apocalypse . In both he included only three of the four riders described in the Revelation to John, an interpretation preferred by Steiner.

Despite the apocalyptic motifs, the imagery has been referred to as the “‘small pleasures’ . . . rowing, loving, riding.” 48 This would seem to ignore not only the relationship of the imagery to earlier apocalyptically titled works, but also the relationship of the imagery in the painting to vivid metaphors found in Kandinsky’s essays, particularly in Concerning the Spiritual . Although Kandinsky did not write a specific essay about Small Pleasures , many of his verbal images in Concerning the Spiritual correspond to motifs in the paintings. The central image of the walled city on top of a mountain threatened by dark clouds frequently appears. In one section of Concerning the Spiritual , Kandinsky wrote:

Humanity is living in such a spiritual city, subject to sudden disturbances for which neither architects nor mathematicians have made allowance. In one place lies a great wall fallen down like a house of cards, in another are the ruins of a huge tower which once stretched to the sky. . . . Spots appear on the sun, and the sun grows dark; and what power is left against the dark? 49

In another section, Kandinsky seemed to be describing the purpose of the storm-tossed boat in Small Pleasures when he equated the anxiety and fear of his age as similar to the “nervousness, a sense of insecurity” of those at sea, when “the continent left behind in mist, dark clouds gather, and the winds raise the water into black mountains.” 50 In addition, Kandinsky’s frequent use of light as a metaphor for awareness and knowledge and his feeling that the color blue could express the spiritual suggests that the sun in the upper left of Small Pleasures , which in the first version was painted blue, is meant to represent the higher planes of the spiritual world.

Kandinsky’s use of certain of the motifs, moreover, seems directly related to Steiner’s attempt to put a more positive cast on apocalyptic symbols. In his lecture on the Revelation of John, Steiner stressed, for example, that the fourth horseman, traditionally indicating death, should be eliminated. 51 Indeed, in one of Steiner’s drawings of the apocalypse, the fourth horseman is barely visible. 52 Kandinsky may have been following Steiner’s injunction when he eliminated the fourth horseman from all of his versions, even from those called Horsemen of the Apocalypse . Kandinsky’s choice of the sun motif as a sign of the spiritual may reflect Steiner’s characterization of the sun as the essence of Christianity. Then the three apocalyptic horsemen leaping from the stormy sea toward the sun could be understood as a visual metaphor, not of the pestilence coming on the day of the judgment, but of the struggle to attain the light—enlightenment. Kandinsky often equated the horse and rider to the artist and his talent 53 and stated that the artist was to lead the way to the future. The theme of regeneration emerging from this more positive interpretation of the apocalypse is reflected in Kandinsky’s statement of 1913 that “out of the most effective destruction sounds a living praise, like a hymn to the new creation, which follows the destruction.” 54

While Small Pleasures may indeed reflect Steiner’s messianic views that the next epoch would only emerge after great destruction, little besides the theme and the motifs used to transmit the message can be attributed to Steiner. The means he used to transform the image into a hidden construction reflect other sources. Redon, Denis, and Matisse contributed much to Kandinsky’s use of color and blurred edges to make his imagery ambiguous. And the Symbolist theory of correspondences strengthened his belief in the power of multiple stimuli in the form of residual motifs and layers of colors, related to the themes of the motifs, to reinforce his message. The motifs of storm and turmoil, such as the boat tossed by waves, on the right side of Small Pleasures , are reinforced by the darker colors of the black-brown cloud formation in the upper right. The more optimistic motifs of the sun, the couple, and the three apocalyptic riders on the left side of the painting are supported by warmer and brighter colors. However, the multiple stimuli are not always parallel. The title, for example, is clearly ironic and serves as a disguise for the deeper meaning of the painting which could only be grasped, according to Kandinsky’s intention, after much study and meditation. Although there is some general correspondence of color to motifs, the difference in color between the right and left sides of the painting is not striking. Indeed, at first glance the color division from bright to dark might not even be noticed. Through these devices of ambiguous multiple stimuli based on residual images of an apocalyptic nature overlaid with color, Kandinsky sought to communicate a tension and an uncertainty in his paintings which would express the dissonance of his age in juxtaposition with his hope for a better future.

Kandinsky was not alone in finding the step to abstraction a difficult one to take during this period. One thinks of the “hermetic” paintings of Picasso and Braque in 1911, where the objects are so dissected as to be virtually unrecognizable. But then, their use of more visible objects in paintings of the very next year indicates their resistance to abstraction. Gleizes and Metzinger verbally testified to this dilemma in their short essay on Cubism, stating: “Nevertheless, let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished; as yet, at all events. An art cannot be raised all at once to the level of pure effusion.” 55 Although Kandinsky had contact with the various Cubist groups, his hidden object bears little visual relation to the Cubist fragmentation of the object into geometric components. Nonetheless, many of the Cubists, as well as Kandinsky, would use one motif to bring the rest of the painting into focus. 56 In Picasso’s Man with Pipe of 1911, for example, once we fixate on the pipe, easily identified by the white color in the upper center, the simplified and fragmented forms of the man come into focus. Picasso’s signs don’t have the messianic implications of Kandinsky’s, yet the efforts of both artists were frequently viewed in a similar context before the First World War. Their movement away from representationalism was considered so radical at that time that both men were called “Expressionists.” By 1914, they were clearly moving in different directions and while Picasso’s signs became more readable, Kandinsky’s became almost incomprehensible.

By the end of 1913 Kandinsky had grown increasingly discouraged that his art could reach the uninitiated. The constant criticism of his paintings as meaningless and decorative had taken its toll. In 1914 Kandinsky began to make notations for changes in Concerning the Spiritual which indicated that he felt a few artists could venture into the sphere of abstraction. Even though the process for most of his works of late 1913 and 1914 was the same as the past several years, in some paintings the hidden images became so thoroughly veiled or stripped as to be virtually unrecognizable. Unlike Small Pleasures , where even without studies some sort of imagery can be recognized, a few paintings such as Light Picture appear to have dispensed with apocalyptic imagery and to have substituted what Kandinsky would later call a sensation of the cosmos or infinity. At this point, the outbreak of World War I separated him from his friends and sources in Germany. When Kandinsky finally returned to Germany in 1921 after a lengthy stay in his native Russia, his solutions to the problems of abstraction had been radically altered.

Rose-Carol Washton Long is on the faculty of Queens College, City University of New York. This article is an adaptation of material from her forthcoming book on Kandinsky to be published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford .

An exhibition of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Kandinsky collection will take place from May 12th through September 5th.

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1. V. Kandinsky, “W. Kandinsky: Selbstcharakteristik,” Das Kunstblatt , III, 6, 1919, p. 173.

2. Kandinsky began to state in his essays of 1913 that he had made a major step in the creation of abstract forms. In his autobiography, “Rückblicke,” first published in the catalogue, Kandinsky, 1909–1913 , Berlin, 1913, he described those paintings as closest to abstraction where the forms grew “out of the artist” rather than Originating from nature, a separation which he felt he was just beginning to achieve in that year. See p. xxv. Also see his lecture read at the gallery, Kreis der Kunst, in Cologne on January 30, 1914, in J. Eichner, Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter , Munich, 1957, pp. 109–116.

3. W. Grohmann, “Wassily Kandinsky,” Der Cicerone , XVI, 9, 1924, p. 895.

4. See K. Lindsay’s review of W. Grohmann’s monograph on Kandinsky in The Art Bulletin , XLI, 4, 1959, p. 350, which challenged the accuracy of the 1910 date for the work called the “first abstract watercolor.” See also L. Eitner, “Kandinsky in Munich,” The Burlington Magazine , XCIX, 651, 1957, pp. 192–197, and D. Robins, “Vasily Kandinsky: Abstraction and Image,” The Art Journal , XXII, 3, 1963, pp. 145–147.

5. K. Brisch in his unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, “Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der gegenstandslosen Malerei an seinem Werk von 1900–1921,” University of Bonn, 1955, was the first scholar to explore the apocalyptic motifs in Kandinsky’s pre-World War I paintings. See also H. K. Röthel, “Kandinsky: Improvisation Klamm, vorstuffen einer Deulung,” Eberhard Hanfstaengl zum 75 . Geburtstag , Munich, 1961, pp. 186–192, where the imagery in a painting of 1914 is identified.

6. Many of the quotations from Concerning the Spiritual in Art are my translations from the German text of 1912, Uber das Geistige in der Kunst , 7th ed. (which follows the 2nd ed. of 1912), Bern-Bümpliz, 1963, p. 26, hereafter cited as U.D.G. The best English translation by F. Golffing, M. Harrison, and F. Ostertag, New York, 1947, is based on additions of 1914 and will be used, hereafter cited as C.T.S. , when the translation does not conflict with the German version.

7. See Kandinsky, “Rückblicke,” p. xxvii or its English translation, “Reminiscences,” Modern Artists on Art , ed. R. Herbert, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1964, p. 42.

8. U.D.G. , pp. 107–108.

9. Ibid., p. 143.

10. Although Theosophy has been connected with Kandinsky’s name since 1912, the relationship has not been taken seriously until recently. See L. D. Ettlinger, Kandinsky’s “At Rest,” London, 1961; S. Ringbom, “Art in ‘the Epoch of the Great Spiritual’, Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , XXIX, 1966, pp. 386–418; L. Sidhare, “Oriental Influences on Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, 1909–1917,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1967; and my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, listed under my maiden name, R.-C. Washton, “Vasily Kandinsky, 1909–1913: Painting and Theory,” Yale University, 1968.

11. U.D.G. , pp. 42–43.

12. Ibid., p. 43.

13. Ibid., p. 107.

14. Between 1906 and 1914, Steiner devoted the majority of his lecture programs to an elucidation of the Gospels. See J. Hemleben, Rudolf Steiner , Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1963, p. 162. As early as 1902, Steiner revealed his Christian orientation in Das Christentum als mystische Thatsache , Berlin, 1902. Because of increasing differences with the international Theosophical Society, Steiner founded his own group in 1913, which he defined as Anthroposophical.

15. Between 1896–1911, Kandinsky had been exposed to a variety of Symbolist concepts. Although Symbolism reached its height as a literary movement in France in the mid-nineties, its impact was of a longer duration in Germany and Russia. In fact, in Russia, Symbolism continued to be a dominant influence in intellectual circles as late as 1911. Kandinsky was the Munich correspondent for the Russian Symbolist periodical, Apollon , 1909 and 1910.

16. Solov’ev’s vision of the cleansing effect of the Apocalypse is reflected in the works of the Russian Symbolist poets Blok and Belyj, both of whom described in their writings of the era before the First World War, the power of Symbolism to create a religious art, not merely an esthetic. It is noteworthy that Belyj also became interested in Steiner and went in 1914 to stay with Steiner at his Goethenaum in Dornach, Switzerland. Kandinsky mentions neither Solov’ev nor Belyj nor Blok, but his friend Marianne von Werefkin, with whom he spent the summers in Murnau during 1909 and 1910, is reported to have been in contact with a number of the Russian Symbolists. See J. Hahl-Koch, Marianne Werefkin und der russische Symbolismus , Munich, 1967.

17. C. Weiler, who holds the diary of Marianne von Werefkin, reported in his biography of her companion, Jawlensky, that both artists had introduced Kandinsky to the ideas of Steiner, perhaps during the summer of 1909. Weiler stated that Jawlensky had spoken with Steiner and had seen one of his plays. See Alexej Jawlensky , Cologne, 1959, pp. 68, 70–73. According to Weiler, Kandinsky had attended a lecture by Steiner on Goethe’s Faust in Berlin during April of 1908 and had been inspired to illustrate the Ariel scene. See W. Grohmann, Wassily Kandinsky , New York, 1958, p. 41. One of Kandinsky’s pupils, Maria Strakosch-Geisler, is reported to have attended a lecture of Steiner’s in Berlin during 1908. See A. Strakosch, Lebenswege mit Rudolf Steiner , Strasbourg, 1947, pp. 22–24.

18. For an analysis of this development see Washton, “Vasily Kandinsky, 1909–1913: Painting and Theory.” In The Sounding Cosmos , Abo, 1970, Ringbom also describes Kandinsky’s interest in apocalyptic motifs, which he had not dealt with in his essay of 1966. However, he sees.this interest primarily as a reflection of the fascination with the apocalypse, widely evident at the turn of the century, especially among the Russian Symbolists.

19. The earliest, Paradise , is listed as the last work of 1909 in the house catalogue Kandinsky kept of his paintings. The first of the paintings called Last Judgment is listed in 1910.

20. All Saints’ Day also refers to another aspect of the judgment day, the gathering of all the saints. While the clearest examples of apocalyptic imagery occur in the small glass paintings of 1910, 1911, and 1912, which were modeled after Bavarian folk paintings on glass, a number of oils also contain these apocalyptic titles and motifs. The arrangement of these motifs became the basis for many of his compositions before the First World War.

21. Kandinsky wrote in a letter of September 1, 1911 to Marc that the almanac had to mention Theosophy “concisely and strongly (if possible statistically).” See Der Blaue Reiter , reprint of the 1912 edition with notes by K. Lankheit, Munich, 1965, p. 261.

22. See E. Rolers, “Wassily Kandinsky und die Gestalt des Blauen Reilers,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen , V, 2, 1963, pp. 201–226; also H. Nishida, “Genèse du cavalier bleu,” XXe Siècle , XXVII, 1966, pp. 18–24.

23. II also ignores the prevalence of Christian references in Kandinsky’s essays and poems. See Klänge , Munich, 1913.

24. C.T.S. , pp. 23, 65–66.

25. It is reproduced in Der Blaue Reiter , Lankheit ed., p. 215. Other elements of this motif such as the walled city and the leaping horse and rider can be traced to Kandinsky’s own works of 1902 and 1903.

26. See Kandinsky, lecture, January 30, 1914, in Eichner, Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter , pp. 114–115.

27. U.D.G. , p. 115.

28. Ibid., p. 78.

29. Ibid., p. 129.

30. Kandinsky, “Malerei als reine Kunst,” Der Sturm , IV, 178/179, 1913, p. 99.

31. R. Steiner, Theosophie , 5th ed., Leipzig, 1910, pp. iv, 79, 116. Kandinsky cited this book in Concerning the Spiritual , p. 32, in addition to mentioning articles by Steiner in the magazine, Lucifer-Gnosis .

32. The Symbolists and various occult groups shared an interest in the mysterious and the hidden. During the eighties and nineties in France many of those who were to be called Symbolists were interested in Rosicrucian and Theosophical groups. See J. Senior, The Way Down and Out: The Occult in Symbolist Literature , Ithaca, 1959; G. Mauner, “The Nature of Nabis Symbolism,” The Art Journal , XXIII, 2, 1963–64, pp. 96–103; R. Pincus-Witten, Les Salons de la Rose+Croix , 1892–1897, London, 1968. Similarly Theosophists such as Schuré and the Rosicrucian Peladan adopted ideas from Wagner and the French Symbolists. See G. Wooley, Richard Wagner et le symbolisme Français , Paris, 1931.

33. Symbolism through its visual branches, the Art Nouveau and the Jugendstil, had a direct effect on the subject matter, style, and medium of Kandinsky’s works from 1900 to 1906.

34. U.D.G. , p. 46.

35. Steiner, “Maeterlinck, der ‘Frei Geist’,” 1899, reprinted in Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Veröffentlichungen aus dem literarischen Frühwerk , XXIV, Dornach, Switzerland, 1958, pp. 22–24.

36. See W. Halls, Maurice Maeterlinck, A Study of his Life and Thought , Oxford, 1960, p. 48.

37. U.D.G. , p. 76.

38. Kandinsky had contact with Denis and other Nabis since 1903 when works by Denis and others were displayed in the 1903 Phalanx exhibition organized by Kandinsky. As late as 1912, D. Burliuk wrote in an article, “Die ‘Wilden’ Russlands,” for the Blaue Reiter that Denis’ opinion was highly regarded. See Lankheit ed., p. 47. Redon contributed an essay for the second exhibition catalogue of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, 1910/11.

39. The importance of these drawings was stressed by Ringbom in “Art in ‘the Epoch of the Great Spiritual’,” p. 405.

40. See Kandinsky, “Der gelbe Klang,” Der Blaue Reiter , Lankheil ed., pp. 210–229, or see the English translation by V. Miesel in Voices of German Expressionism , Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1970, pp. 137–145. The music for this stage composition was written by Thomas von Hartmann, a Russian composer living in Munich who later became a follower of the mystic Gurdijev.

41. See Kandinsky, “Uber Bühnenkomposition,” Der Blaue Reiter , Lankheit ed., pp. 195–200. Kandinsky adopted the Wagnerian term “leitmotiv” to describe his concept of the hidden object.

42. See E. Schuré, Le théâtre de l’âme , Paris, 1900, I, pp. xiii–xiv and Schuré, Les grands initiés , Paris, 1909, pp. 438–439. Steiner was much indebted to Schure’s understanding of Wagner.

43. Emy Dresler was a pupil of Kandinsky who exhibited with the Neue Künstlervereinigung; see Sammlungskatalog I, Der Blaue Reiter , 2nd ed., Munich, 1966, p. 12.

44. See Schuré, “Les enfants de Lucifer,” Le théâtre de l’âme , I, and Steiner, Die Prüfung der Seele , Berlin, 1911.

45. Maeterlinck used marionettes in his one act plays and fairy tale figures as the main characters in his larger works to reinforce his departure from the traditional theater. Kandinsky’s use of a chorus offstage may derive from Peladan’s placement of the chorus in his religious dramas.

46. See Kandinsky, “Uber Bühnenkomposition,” and C.T.S. , p. 35.

47. C.T.S. , p. 50.

48. See H. K. Röthel, Vasily Kandinsky, Paintings on Glass , New York, 1966, no. 19.

49. C.T.S. , p. 31.

50. Ibid., p. 30.

51. Steiner, Die Theosophie on der Hand der Apokalypse , 1908, p. 90; copy of the manuscript of this 1908 lecture is located in the Anthroposophical Society, New York.

52. See Steiner, Die Apokalypse des Johannes , 5th ed., Dornach, 1963, no. 3.

53. See Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” pp. 32–33.

54. Kandinsky, ,”Notizen— Komposition 6 ,” Kandinsky, 1901–1913 , p. xxxviii.

55. A. Gleizes and J. Metzinger, “Cubism,” in Herbert, p. 7.

56. In The Rise of Cubism , H.-D. Kahnweiler described the Cubist use of signs as a means of stimulating one’s memory image in order to bring the whole object into mind; see H. Aronson’s translation from the 1920 German edition, New York, 1949, pp. 11–13.

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By Will Fenstermaker

June 14, 2017

There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon, Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France, for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning , then the editor of ARTnews , who ran “The American Action Painters” in December, 1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of “action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read. Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism, Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle. “What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation . In 1955, The Partisan Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness, and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters, such as Frank Stella , Helen Frankenthaler , and Kenneth Noland, had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell. (As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence of formalist discourse.

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time.

Barbara Rose

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for. The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond abstract expressionism.

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many of the most cherished premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism, which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights, women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The Partisan Review , which birthed formalism, had by then distanced itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body, was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam. Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to the September 1970 issue of Artforum , written by Philip Leider, ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical, patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of reactionary art , why would the women picket it? Why not? Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin

While Artforum , in its early history, had established a reputation as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a textbook example of institutional critique.

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is. But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review, Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact, took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed, near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized European genius.

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can scan all art.”

RELATED: From Cuba With Love: Artist Bill Claps on the Island’s DIY Art Scene

Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a (perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black artists for centuries.

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a Noun Vs. Verb

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production became more and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a major source for European and Euro-American exotic interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects of modern life.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine , Anna Chave analyzes how Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in 1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde…. What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures…. But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system: when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful, sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk. My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine. Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame government less because it has long ago outgrown its human dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary humanity and without respect for the common element of human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation . However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two, which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy. After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this “pluralism.”

RELATED: What Was the Pictures Generation?

Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice, especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the “broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it, transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art, whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it applied to everything, so that there was room for deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here , here , here (paywall), and here . Also relevant are reviews of the 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta Smith , Peter Schjeldahl , and Martha Schwendener .

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Abstract Art Essay Examples

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