Abstract Painting

About

Abstract painting treats the canvas as a field to be organised rather than a window to look through. Its early practitioners in the 1910s often reached it by stages: Piet Mondrian pared trees and church façades down to horizontals and verticals before settling, in the early 1920s, on black lines and blocks of primary colour.

Painters since have explored almost every way of putting pigment on a surface. Helen Frankenthaler thinned oil paint and let it soak into raw canvas in Mountains and Sea (1952). Agnes Martin ruled pale pencil grids over faint washes. Bridget Riley made black-and-white patterns in the 1960s that seem to move, and Gerhard Richter began dragging layers of paint across his canvases with a large squeegee around 1980. The surface usually shows how the picture was made: poured, stained, scraped, layered or taped, thick or thin. Process is often the clearest clue to meaning.