Abstraction and Minimalism

The cubist artists of the early 20th century opened doors into the next big form of art to shake up the world: Abstraction.

Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian painter during this time, was one of those who embraced this new form in his 1925 work Swinging. This piece demonstrates a common theme in abstract art, that notion of a lot going on but also nothing specifically happening. You can all the different aspects of the painting but the meaning has never been quite so unclear in the years of painting before this. What Kandinsky was trying to do was show the spiritual aspect of painting. The colors in this work bleed and flow from one to another such as in the orange, blues and purples in the bottom right hand corner or the blues and yellows in the upper left. The shapes are all very statically geometric and where they cross one another they create new shapes. This geometric aspect is prominent within abstraction as a whole.

Another example is No. 98 2478 Red/135 Green, created in 1936 by the Belgian sculptor and painter Georges Vantongerloo. Once again there are geometric shapes, this time far more basic with just squares and rectangular lines. The colors are simple with just white, red, green, black, and a light, which is used as a visual break for the eye. The structure of this piece is a lot more simple than the Kandinsky and is a lot more limited and structured with its shapes and primary color use. The entire piece is based on a mathematical formula that gives it its exact dimensions.

After abstraction came minimalism, which was a reaction to industrialism in the early 20th century, Hans Haacke created the Condensation Cube and managed to create a natural world inside of the cube apart from the industrial world. The cube is a product of its environment and it depends on the world it lives in, in comparison to how the natural world is now a product of the people after the industrial revolution.