Abstract Paintings by European and American Artists, April 25-May 28, 1933

Abstract art, also called nonobjective art or nonrepresentational art, describes painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays little or no part. All art consists largely of elements that can be called abstract–elements of form, color, line, tone, and texture. Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe, illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization and exposition dominated over expressive function. Imitation and representation were the main goals.

Abstract art in its strictest sense has its origins in the 19th century. The period characterized by such a vast body of elaborately representational art produced for the sake of illustrating anecdote also produced a number of painters who examined the mechanism of light and visual perception. The period of Romanticism had put forward ideas about art that denied classicism’s emphasis on imitation and idealization and had instead stressed the role of imagination and of the unconscious as the essential creative factors. Gradually many painters of this period began to accept the new freedom and the new responsibilities implied in these attitudes.

All the major movements of the first two decades of the 20th century, including Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, in some way emphasized the gap between art and natural appearances.

There is, however, a deep distinction between abstracting from appearances, even to the point of unrecognizability, and making works of art out of forms not drawn from the visible world. During the four or five years preceding World War I, such artists as Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin turned to fundamentally abstract art. Kandinsky is regarded as having been one of the first modern artists to paint purely abstract pictures containing no recognizable objects in 1910-1911. However, the majority of progressive artists disfavored the abandonment of every degree of representation. During World War I the emergence of the de Stijl group in the Netherlands and of the Dada group in Zürich further widened the spectrum of abstract art.

Ironically for this 1933 exhibition at the Legion of Honor, abstract art did not flourish between World War I and World War II. Beset by totalitarian politics and by art movements placing renewed emphasis on imagery, such as Surrealism and Realism, it received little notice. In fact, several societies of artists rallied against abstraction, going so far as to create their own rebuttal works and exhibitions. However, after World War II an energetic American school of abstract painting called Abstract Expressionism emerged and had wide influence. Beginning in the 1950s abstract art was an accepted and widely practiced approach within European and American painting and sculpture. The popularity of abstract art at that time is greatly indicated by the large number of abstract exhibitions that were held at the neighboring de Young through the 1950s.

Source: Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "abstract art." Encyclopedia Britannica, March 5, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/art/abstract-art.