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Article: On Abstract Art.
- Article from:
- Art in America
- Article date:
- May 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Abstract art -- work that is neither figurative, mimetic nor empirically descriptive of the external world -- has been a relative latecomer in the Western tradition, although it seems to be the rule rather than the exception within many non-Western cultures. Art historians generally locate the emergence of pure abstraction in a series of founding moments: Brancusi's stylized sculptural heads and Kandinsky's quasi-abstract paintings of 1911, the collages of Picasso and Braque of 1913, Malevich's seminal Black Square of 1915, the "breakthrough" paintings of Mondrian of 1917.
Using these works as benchmarks, abstract art in the West is not even a century old, and to ...