ABSTRACTION

In aesthetics, ‘abstraction’ denotes forms of art and literature that present their materials – whether visual or verbal – in ways that strongly privilege formal arrangements over meaning or reference. Abstraction is thus implicitly juxtaposed with work that is figurative or representational – that aims to correspond to real things in the world. Following the fifteenth-century ‘discovery’ of the rules of linear perspective, which permitted the convincing depiction of three-dimensional objects on a flat canvas, and the seventeenthand eighteenth-century rise of the novel, with its attentiveness to everyday detail and clear, unadorned, ‘transparent’ prose, the desire accurately to change the world in art grew progressively more dominant in Western culture. Art, however, was abstract long before it was figurative. Prehistoric art is highly stylised in its depictions of humans and animals, and often forgoes figuration entirely in favour of pure arrangements of line, form and colour. Beyond Europe and North America, non-figurative artistic traditions remained central to cultural expression long after the onset of WESTERN MODERNITY.

Following the progressively more radical disfiguring of the image performed by the IMPRESSIONISTS, the post-IMPRESSIONISTS, the FAUVISTS and the CUBISTS, the decisive breakthrough to abstraction in modern art came around 1910 as painters such as Wassily Kandinsky, Francis Picabia, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, began to produce works wholly shaped by their own internal formal logic and devoid of representational content. Malevich's SUPREMATIST masterpiece Black Square (1915) is the ultimate example: a square canvas entirely covered with black paint. The conceptual implications of modernist abstraction are complex, however. As Hal Foster and his collaborators note in an important survey of twentieth-century art, a ‘tension between idealist and materialist imperatives runs throughout modernist abstraction’ (Foster et al. 2004: 119). On the one hand, abstract artists ‘moved away from a MIMETIC relation to the world’ in order to evoke ‘transcendental concepts’ or ‘ideal states’ (Foster et al.2004: 119), but at the same time such works also had a distinctly different valence. ‘Abstraction approaches the nonobjective by definition’ but ‘many artists sought “objectivity” above all – to make art as “concrete” and as “real” as an object in the world’, hence an emphasis on ‘the materiality of paint on canvas’ (Foster et al. 2004: 119).