Abstractions
The Origins of Abstractions
To 'abstract' means to draw away from, to separate, not to refer to something particular anymore. A movement of conscious and methodical destruction of particular and recognizable in appearance. Artistic elimination of rational visual association. In a way it is synthetical purification and intensification of colours, forms and ideas that leads to creation of artwork that either resembles a direct print of a soul that refused to undergo rational filters of mind and cognoscence, or a quasi-scientific, almost mathematical picture that looks so rational it's difficult to believe how irrational it actually is.
The art historians are still out, trying to determine who was the first abstract painter. Whatever is the case, the abstract painting sprang up at the same moment, and in the several places simultaneously: in Moscow and petersburg (Rayonism, Constructivism...), Netherlands (De Stijl) Paris (Cubism), Munich (The Bauhaus)...
Constructivism
Constructivism was first created in Russia in 1913 when the Russian sculptor Vladimir Tatlin, during his journey to Paris, discovered the works of Braque and Picasso. When Tatlin was back in Russia, he began producing sculptured out of assemblages, but he abandoned any reference to precise subjects or themes. Those works marked the appearance of Constructivism. The name Constructivism did not describe a specific movement but rather a trend within the fields of painting, sculpture and especially closely conjoined artists and their art with machine production, architecture and the applied arts.
Constructivism art refers to the optimistic, non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics and painting. The artists did not believe in abstract ideas, rather they tried to link art with concrete and tangible ideas. Early modern movements around WWI were idealistic, seeking a new order in art and architecture that dealt with social and economic problems. They wanted to renew the idea that the apex of artwork does not revolve around "fine art", but rather emphasized that the most priceless artwork can often be discovered in the nuances of "practical art" and through portraying man and mechanization into one aesthetic program.
Constructivism was an invention of the Russian avant-garde that found adherents across the continent. The artists mainly consisted of young Russians trying to engage the full ideas of modern art on their own terms. They depicted art that was mostly three dimensional, and they also often portrayed art that could be connected to their Proletarian beliefs. Theory of constructivism is derived from Russian Suprematism, Dutch Neo Plasticism (De Stijl) and the German Bauhaus. Germany was the site of the most Constructivist activity outside of the Soviet Union to Walter Gropius's Bauhaus, a progressive art and design school sympathetic to the movement, same as other art centers, like Paris, London, and eventually the United States.
Rayonism
Rayonism represents one of the first steps toward the development of abstract art in Russia and was founded by Mikhail F. Larionov and his wife Natalia Goncharova.
The new style was a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism and is also known as Cubo-Futurism. In 1913 Larionov published his Rayonist Manifesto.
For several years prior to this they had been traveling organizing exhibitions and had come under the influence of Moscow's Slavophil Neo-Primitive movement, which opposed the pro-Western European stance in St. Petersburg. They and their Neo-Primitive friends were convinced that in order to participate in the international avant-garde, they would, ironically, have to return to their own roots. Reflecting these beliefs, the paintings they made around 1905 are based on primitive form of art that drew its inspiration from Russian folklore.
They stayed in Paris and took part in the 1906 Autumn Salon with the Union of Russian Artists and the collaboration of Sergey Diaghilev who subsequently explored the many different possibilities offered by Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism.
They turned their back on all manner of technical formulation and all kinds of erudite cultural references.In about 1911 Larionov and Goncharova produced works made up of diagonal beams of color. Blocky Cubist shapes are closely packed in a dynamic Futurist rhythm across a surface also marked by a series of sharp diagonals. Some paintings featured one predominant color. Next, this compositions were worked out in an autonomous way: only the rhythms and harmonies then guided the painter in his attempt to make the dynamic radiation of the colors perceptible.
After Larionov and Goncharova left for Paris in 1915 to work for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Rayonism ended. Larionov's works were exhibited in the Paul Guillaume gallery. Not long after this move, war broke out and Larionov was called to action. He was wounded and returned to Moscow.
The brief life of Cubo-Futurism (Rayonism) suggests the considerable confusion that many Russians felt over the question of rural versus urban, agrarian versus industrial, and Russian versus French. The one issue Goncharova and Larionov were not in doubt was artistic progress and they wanted to contribute to it. After Larionov's return to Moscow, the Suprematists and the Constructivists were now center stage.
Suprematism
Suprematism considered the first systematic school of purely abstract pictorial composition in the modern movement, based on geometric figures and was the expression "of the supremacy of pure sensation in creative art". It is Russian art movement founded (1913) by Kazimir Malevich in Moscow, parallel to constructivism.
The Suprematist project was above all the brainchild of the painter and theoretician Malevich. According to him, Suprematism sought "to liberate art from the ballast of the representational world." The work of the painter no longer involved representing and creating chromatic harmonies or formal compositions, but rather attaining the limits of painting. It consisted of geometrical shapes flatly painted on the pure canvas surface. The pictorial space had to be emptied of all symbolic content and all content signifying form. It had to be decongested and cleared, so as to show a new reality where thought was of prime importance.
In 1915 Malevich exhibited Black Square on a White Ground. For this show he also published From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, a tract in which he described a sequence of avant-garde movements within a historical perspective. Three years later, Malevich painted White Square on a White Ground, part of his famous White on White series. Here, the abstraction of painting attained and fully revealed the abstraction of thought and embodied the movement's principles. Malevich was given a cold shoulder by the Stalinist regime, but he carried on his exploratory work by returning to figurative forms and subjects drawn from the everyday life.
Suprematism changed the future of modern art, architecture, and industrial design, through its dissemination by the Bauhaus and today continues to inspire artists throughout the world.
De Stijl
The De Stijl (literally, "the style") art movement was founded by the painter and architect Theo van Doesburg in Leiden in 1917. It encompassed a new type of style in modern art and architecture. This movement used the artistic talent of the artists by designing homes, buildings, and furniture.
Founder members of the group included the painter Mondrian, the sculptor Vantongerloo, the architect J.J.P. Oud and the designer and architect Rietveld. They were eager to develop a new aesthetic consciousness and an objective art based on clear principles. Their work and research extended to the fine arts, city and town planning, the applied arts and philosophy.
A magazine called De Stijl, published between 1917 and 1932, presented the movement's works and theoretical foundations to an international readership. In the magazine Mondrian wrote, "The pure plastic vision should build a new society, in the same way that in art it has built a new plasticism." Hiss article, "The New Plastic in Painting", best expresses their ideas for reduction of form and simplistic abstraction: "The new plastic art...can only be based on the abstraction of all form and color, i.e. the straight line and the clearly defined primary color" (Lemoine, 1987, p.29).
Art was seen as a collective approach, with a language that went beyond cultural, geographical and political divisions. The depersonalization of the artwork was carried through into the execution which was anonymous and impersonal. The artist's personality took a back seat to a conscious and calculated working process. The key ideas underpinning the movement could not be separated from Mondrian's aesthetic theory of Neo-Plasticism. This theory was aimed at scaling down the formal components of art - only primary colors and straight lines. A painting was derived from the features of the surface, although many De Stijl paintings were abstractions of natural phenomena, such as van Doesburg's "Rhythms of a Russian Dance" (1918).
While Mondrian's work adhered to the strict principles of Neo-Plasticism, Van Doesburg sought to broaden the movement's research projects into architecture, reconceiving the entire living environment. A De Stijl picture represented a fragment of a larger project concerning space: the house as an interior space, and the city as an assembly of houses. The austere forms of De Stijl were well suited to the geometric structures favored by the International Modernist movement, while the primary colors favored by the painters could be used as decorative elements to articulate an otherwise plain facade.
The principles of De Stijl art and design exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus Style in Germany in the 1920s, and after Mondrian's immigration to New York in 1940, the U.S.A.
Purism
Purism was another movement interested in a kind of utopian vision of art and the modern world. Purism was comprised of only two artists: Amédée Ozenfant and Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). In their own manifesto, Après le Cubisme, published in 1918, they criticized that the heirs of Cubism produced an art that was essentially decorative and ornamental which they believed to be inferior to an approach that would give attention to the basic, essential form of objects. Moreover, they believed that fantasy and individuality had no place in modern art.
The machine became the artist's reference, the exemplary symbol of their age. Architectonic form most defines their paintings. The two artists remained faithful to the traditional genre of the still life and everyday objects-a bottle, a pipe, a tool, a musical instrument, and produced diagrammatic and colorful compositions, the outcome of a methodical line of thought and a methodical working method. Ultimately Jeanneret turned his attentions fully to architecture, which would be the logical extension of this approach.
Circle and Square
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