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In abstract art, the "eye of the beholder" is truly in play. Whatever you think the painting is about is a legitimate conclusion. While the artist may have had an idea in mind when he or she painted the art, the only thing that really matters is what YOU think.
Abstract art does not represent the "real" form of an object. It may distort the shape, color, size or form of the object or person it is displaying. The artist is using exaggeration or simplification of the forms he or she sees. This is what makes this art form exciting.
There are many different styles of abstract art, but three abstract forms really stand out from the rest. Cubism, Neoplasticism and Abstract Expressionism. Some of the most famous cubists were Pablo Picasso and George Braque. Piet Mondrian was a great artist in the Neoplasticism movement. In Abstract Expressionism, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollack were the leaders.
In Cubism, a very analytical approach to the object is taken. The painting uses the basic geometric solid and emphasizes light and color. This is a throwback to the Impressionist painting period. According to the artist, Paul Cezanne, "Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder." These three shapes are used by the Cubist artist and stand out in the paintings. Cubists also show different views of the painted objects views that usually could not be created in real life.
Cubism began in Paris in 1908 and lasted through the 1920s. Besides Picasso and Braque, other famous cubist painters include Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia and Roger De La Fresnaye.
Georges Braque was born in 1882 near Paris, He loved painting with bright colors an unstructured forms. In 1908, he began painting as a cubist and he studied light and perspective carefully. He learned how to shade his cubes to make them look both flat and three-dimensional at the same time.
When Braque began to work with the famous Picasso, they used neutral colors and complex geometric patterns. Their combined style is called analytic cubism. Later, Braque used collage in his work, using everyday objects to create paintings. In later life, Braque returned to bright colors and textured surfaces and also did a lot of still lifes.
Neoplasticism tries to express the absolutes in life. Neoplastic artists stayed very far away from representing art as real objects. These artists believed that the only absolutes in life were vertical and horizontal lines along with the primary colors red, yellow and blue.
The Neoplastic movement began in 1910 and was developed by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. Piet Mondrian was born in 1872 in Amerfoort, Netherlands. He began his art career as a landscape artist using pretty colors grays, mauves and dark greens. Around 1908, he started to paint with bright colors, influenced by some of the Dutch painters. He decided to go beyond nature, so he imitated the Dutch style.
By 1911, Modrian was imitating the cubists, but this did not satisfy him. He moved to a more semi-natural form of art and painted a series of trees and scaffoldings. With van Doesburg, he founded De Stijl, an art magazine, and they developed the Neoplastic style further. As Mondrian aged, his art work became less severe and he began to use brighter colors. He died in 1944.
In Abstract Expressionism, the painter is very spontaneous in what goes on the canvas. Therefore, there is a lot of the artist's personality in the work. Most of this art is about color and brush stroke, certainly not about painting an object that is realistic.
There are actually two types of abstract expressionism. The first is called Action Painting and the other is Color Field Painting. Jackson Pollock used Action Painting to show texture and movement. Often, he would not even use a brush, but just drip or pour the paint onto the canvas. In his action painting, he used intricate, interlaced patterns of color.
Jackson Pollock was heavily influenced by surrealism in the 1940s and his paintings became more and more abstract. By the 1950s his painting became very dark, crisscrossing browns and blacks across the canvas. He entered a very troubled time in his life.
Color Field painters are only concerned with color and shape. Mark Rothko used a lot of colorful rectangles in his work. Born Marcus Rothkovich in Russian, he came to the United States in 1913 and was a self-taught artist. He, too, was influenced by surrealism and he would paint large, hazily defined rectangles of color on the canvas.
Rothko enjoyed bright, happy colors, unlike Pollack. He believed that bright colors conveyed his emotions and his sense of spirituality. Other well-know abstract expressionists include Willem de Kooning, Adophn Gottieb, and Jean Debuffet.
The world of abstract art is truly a varied art form. Many different artists used many different styles to express themselves in ways other than what we usually think of as art. Realism was simply not
About the author
Stefanie Spikell is a writer and artist who excels in watercolor, mosaic and acrylicpaintings. Stefanie writes for a1paintings.com and other business and art websites.
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