ABSTRACT’S SECOND ACT

ALTHOUGH ARGUABLY ALL ART IS ABSTRACTION, the idea of painting “abstractly,” that is to say, without creating representations of external objects, dates back to around 1910. The “non-objective” painting practiced by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Frantisek Kupka, Robert Delaunay, and others in Europe and the U.S. at that time was revolutionary but remained limited in its appeal. The public was largely bewildered and most modernist artists continued to retain some elements of figuration in their work. After World War II, however, abstraction, in the form of Abstract Expressionism and related schools, became the dominant mode of art making and conquered the art market. This triumph was short-lived, and the 1950s proved to be the high-water mark of abstraction in art. In the 1960s and ’70s, new approaches arose including Pop Art, Minimalism, performance, conceptual art, installation art, video and other new media, many of which employed figuration. Even those, such as Minimalism, that did not use figuration still departed significantly from the aims and methods of abstraction. Moreover, the new movements de-emphasized painting, to the point where many critics and even artists declared—some with glee, some with sadness, some with resignation—that painting itself was “dead.”

Of course, as we now know, abstract painting was by no means dead,