Abstract art

The story

Painting without painting something

For centuries, when people said “a painting”, they thought of a picture of something: a portrait, a landscape, a scene from the Bible or from history, a still life with fruit and flowers. A painter had to know how to depict things well, so that they looked like reality. Then, at the start of the 20th century, some artists asked themselves: what if a painting could exist without showing anything at all? Just colours, lines and shapes, in the same way that music is made of sounds and not of words.

The artist who took this step more than anyone else was the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. He was born in Moscow in 1866, had studied law and economics, and at thirty, when he already had a secure career, he gave everything up to become a painter. He moved to Munich, in Germany, then one of the centres of art. He had a special gift: he felt colours as sounds. Yellow seemed to him like a shrill trumpet, deep blue like a cello, black like silence.

A painting upside down

Kandinsky told how the idea came to him one evening when he came back into his studio and saw a painting leaning on its side that he did not recognise: it was made only of shapes and colours, and was extraordinarily beautiful. He understood that what made a painting beautiful was not necessarily the object it showed. In 1910 he painted a watercolour with no recognisable subject, which for years was considered the first abstract painting, although historians argue about the exact date. In 1911 he published a book, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, in which he explained that colours and shapes can touch the soul just as music does. The same year, with his friend Franz Marc, he founded the group called “The Blue Rider” (Der Blaue Reiter).

His paintings, with big patches of bright colours, black lines like lightning bolts, and circles and triangles that seem to dance, were called “Impressions”, “Improvisations” or “Compositions”, like pieces of music. Many visitors to the exhibitions were bewildered: where was the landscape? What did it mean? Kandinsky replied that there was nothing to “understand”: you had to let yourself be moved.

A forgotten pioneer

In the same years, in Sweden, another artist was painting abstract pictures without anyone knowing: Hilma af Klint. Born in 1862 in Solna, near Stockholm, she had studied at the Academy and painted landscapes, but she was interested in spiritual and scientific ideas. Between 1906 and 1915 she created a large series of almost two hundred works, the “Paintings for the Temple”, with curving shapes, spirals and brilliant colours, often enormous. When she died, in 1944, she left instructions that the paintings should not be shown until twenty years after her death, because she felt the world was not ready. They were first shown only in 1986, and in 2018 a major exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York was a huge success. Today many historians consider her one of the first abstract painters.

Other paths of abstract art

Abstract art soon took many directions. In 1915 the Russian Kazimir Malevich painted a black square on a white background, a very simple work, almost a provocation, which became a symbol: art can be reduced to a pure shape. The Dutchman Piet Mondrian, who started with landscapes with trees, simplified his images more and more until he reduced them to straight black lines and rectangles of primary colours, red, blue and yellow, in a search for balance and harmony. The Czech František Kupka and the Italian Giacomo Balla also explored movement and colour.

In the 1920s Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus, a German school of art and design, where abstract ideas mixed with architecture, furniture and graphic design. In 1937 the Nazi regime put many of these artists on trial in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition: in reality it saw them as dangerous because of their freedom.