Abstractionism

The non-figurative art, or abstract art is a visual art movement that arose at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the main driving ideas of abstractionism is the desire to abandon the “lifelike”, that is, the rejection of depicting any objects that surround us in real life. A huge contribution to the formation of abstractionism as a phenomenon was made by the Russian artists W. Kandinsky, K. Malevich, as well as the Dutch artist P. Mondrian, the Czech painter František Kupka and the French artist Robert Delaunay. The main goal of abstract artists was the harmonization of abstract images, and the main visual instruments were all kinds of abstract geometric shapes and colour combinations. With their help, the abstract painters created designs to evoke certain associations in the imagination of the viewer.

Abstractionist artists

The Dutch artist Pete Mondrian became interested in painting at an early age , and he was educated at an art school in Amsterdam. Initially, he was greatly influenced by French impressionism. After visiting the art exhibition by cubist artists, Mondrian was so inspired by their ideas that he left the Netherlands and moved to Paris, where he learned the intricacies of the artistic style. Soon, he completely abandoned the traditional painting techniques and became one of the founders of the new trend, neoplasticism. Mondrian used a limited number of colours and shades, and he created asymmetric compositions of hard lines trying to achieve a certain balance in them. According to the painter, his main goal was to create a “pure plastic reality”. Among his most famous abstract paintings are “Summer Dune in New Zealand”, “Broadway Boogie Woogie”, “Still Life with Gingerpot”, “Place de la Concorde”, “Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black”.

The prominent Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky is one of the universally recognized ideologists and founders of abstract art. He began to paint in adulthood and immediately showed such “inadmissible” qualities as frivolous treatment of the form, colours and composition. The most fruitful period in his work was the time spent in Munich and Paris. Kandinsky was the founder of several creative associations of abstract artists (The Phalanx, The Blue Rider), and the founder of his own art school as well. Over the years spent in Germany, Kandinsky created several hundred paintings and watercolours, but, unfortunately, with the Nazis coming to power, many of them were lost or destroyed. His most famous abstract paintings are “Small Worlds”, “Orange Violet”, “Fragile”, “Surfaces meeting”, etc.

The artist František Kupka was born in the Czech Republic during the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He received his art education in Vienna, but he lived most of his life in France. Kupka worked a lot as a book illustrator, and also as a cartoonist in periodicals. An important stage in the painter’s life was the production of his own “Creation in the Plastic Arts” theory, in which he substantiated the ideas of abstract art theoretically. Among the abstract paintings created by the artist, the most famous are “Disks of Newton”, “Study for the Language of Verticals”, “Nocturne”, “Music”, a series of paintings “Vertical and Diagonal Planes”, etc.