Abstract Art

During and after the First World War, the pioneers of abstract art formulated a new plastic language in which local, particular and national differences were gradually absorbed into a universal expression. From the child to the mature individual, and from faraway cultures to the centers of modern civilization, this new ABC of a world art in the making is open for all to read. Today it is widely accepted via advertising, typography, design, and architecture and is in use throughout the world. On higher esthetic levels, the tempo of change is slower and it may take time to merge the contributions of all past cultures and to create a world tradition in art. But today everything vitally creative in art takes place, for the most part, in the abstract domain; all the esthetic arguments are conducted on this level.

The birth of abstract art represented a basic shift from a sensorial culture toward a new ideational one. Once the image of individual man dominating nature - the central theme of the Renaissance -was done away with, the boundaries of art were extended to include the whole universe and man's mind. Man now took his place in the cosmos along with all other living organisms. This 'death of humanism' was actually the extension of its ethos on a higher level. Thus Western art was brought close to the metaphysical speculations of Oriental thought: Vedantism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism.

Of all the pioneers of abstract art, two men have been most conscious of the meaning of this fundamental change in art. Painting today oscillates between two poles of expression: Mondrian and Kandinsky. In 1925, Kandinsky wrote that painting must inevitably quit the materialist world-concept based on the Graeco-Roman tradition and move toward a spiritualized art facing the East. Antipodal in their work, the paths of Mondrian and Kandinsky converge in their theoretical and philosophical views. Both were concerned with scientific inquiry and the new mathematics, to which they felt their work ran parallel. Both joined the Theosophical Society in Europe , which sought a synthesis between Occidental and Oriental thought. Both found no incongruity between science and metaphysics, for both were sustained by idealism, anti-materialism, and universalism.

Every great historic movement in art has a period of exteriorization when its principles are demonstrated in the world, and a period of interiorization, when it turns inward to contemplate its own life. The decade 1935-45 marks the first stage in the expansion of abstract art. In the years after the First World War, when the isolated pioneers were making their discoveries, the main current of art was flowing backward, seeking reconciliation with the natural image (late cubism, neo-classicism, Neu-Sachlichkeit, the right wing of the surrealists). But by 1930, the pioneers had emerged from obscurity to become leaders of a movement that swept Europe . In this era, the structural artists dominated the scene. But the rise of dictatorships and the events leading to the Second World War, stopped all this development and many artists left Europe . The abstract artists who came to the United States during the war ( Mondrian, Leger, Moholy-Nagy, etc.) exerted a profound influence on American painting and helped to implement its direction toward the abstract. The decade 1935-45 was the age of Mondrian.

Mondrian died in New York in 1944; Kandinsky died that same year in Paris . The period immediately after the war saw the triumph of abstract art on a world scale. The decade which has just closed ( 1945-55) was the age of abstract expressionism and it stands under the sign of Kandinsky. It is possible that in the decade we are now entering, the two opposing currents in abstract art will merge and that this will be brought about by influences from the East.