Introduction
All art is intrinsically abstract, as it involves translation of ideas into form. All through history, there have been many different styles of art utilizing an abstracting approach but abstract art was established in the early 20th century as artists began creating works of art lacking any apparent reference to the world of appearances, subject to the laws of art and not those of nature. By abolishing all illusionist illustrations from their work, abstract artists have functioned on an aesthetic approach what Piet Mondrian called “the edge of the abyss.” It was with the revolutionary work of Vasily Kandinsky and Mondrian in the early to mid-1910s that painting developed as truly abstract or non-objective.
Main text
In around 1911, Kandinsky was spiritually influenced by H. P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), the most important exponent of Theosophy in modern times. Theosophical theory proposes that conception is a geometrical succession, beginning with a single point. The creative aspect of the forms is expressed by the descending series of circles, triangles, and squares. Kandinsky’s books ‘Concerning the Spiritual In Art’ (1910) and ‘Point and Line to Plane’ (1926) reverberated this basic Theosophical tenet.
Kandinsky, who is vital figure to German Expressionism, began to paint densely layered compositions of free-floating lines and areas of color, with titles such as ‘Improvisation and Composition’ with the motive of instilling visual form with the properties of music. In some of these early abstract works, for example ‘Painting with White Border’ (1913), there exist landscape elements like hills or trees, but their features have been abridged to a lyrical mosaic of line and color.
Kandinsky in ‘Point and Line to Plane’ promoted the “microscopic” analysis of three basic elements of form including the point, line, and plane thereby claiming that there subsist consistent expressive reactions to simple visual abstract patterns.
Mondrian’s art was constantly closely associated with his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908 he became interested in the theosophical movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
Mondrian and his later work were deeply influenced by the 1911 Moderne Kunstkring exhibition of Cubism in Amsterdam. Mondrian took a diminution approach to form, but used it with a tighter geometric orientation and stricter compositional order.
Mondrian was inspired by landscape, and interpreted it in his earliest abstract paintings as a series of interlocking vertical and horizontal lines.
Mondrian reduced elements to their purest state in compositions of geometric order and balance popularly known as ‘geometric essentialism of Mondrian’ in order to express universal harmony.
Examples of such are in the paintings by a tree created by Mondrian between 1908 and 1912. Mondrian starts with a detailed realistic image of a tree. By the time Mondrian has finished his remarkable compression operation, only the essence, the idea, the law, the genotype of a tree is left.
Thus we see a strict northern diet of horizontal and vertical lines in Mondrian’s abstract art whereas even more emotional fields of abstraction are visible in the art of Wasily Kandinsky.
We envisage the evidence of the most basic pictorial elements comprising of pure colors, straight lines, and simple geometric shapes which is proof of the reduction that took place in Mondrian’s paintings progressing from a detailed figurative image of a tree to a composition consisting from a just a few abstract elements.
Piet Mondrian’s representative studies of a single tree and of the surface of water led him to a tremendously minimum form of abstraction, lastly arriving at simple graphic grids using primary colors: red, blue and yellow.
Summary
Both Kandinsky and Mondrian left extensive philosophical writings explaining the processes of reasoning and logic behind their personal roads to ‘abstraction’, the “realistic” base of which has qualified much of twentieth-century abstraction.