Abstract Art

About

Abstract art covers two related things: images simplified from something seen until the source nearly disappears, and images that never started from the visible world at all. Pattern without subject is ancient, from Neolithic pottery to Islamic tilework, but in European painting the decisive break came in the years before the First World War. Hilma af Klint painted her large series The Ten Largest in 1907, long unseen; Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Robert Delaunay and Kazimir Malevich reached non-objective painting in public over the following years, often with spiritual aims.

From there abstraction split into many strands: Piet Mondrian's grids of primary colour, Constructivist design, the poured skeins of Jackson Pollock, the hard edges of Frank Stella, the quiet pencil grids of Agnes Martin. Look for how the work holds together without a subject: balance, rhythm, scale, the edge of a shape, the way paint sits on the surface.