Abstract painting

In Abstract art artists could use free, often random, application of paint to create images with no tie to reality or nature. Abstraction could be manifest in more purely formal terms, such as color, freed from objective context, and a reduction of form to basic geometric designs. Theo van Doesburg (1883 – 1931), a Dutch artist, defined abstract art as that in which the line, color and surface only, are the concrete reality.

In 1929, Alfred Barr used the term Abstract Expressionism in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky who is considered one of the fathers of abstraction. Abstraction-Création was a group of artists formed in Paris in 1931; founders like Auguste Herbin, Jean Hélion and Georges Vantongerloo started the group to foster abstract art and counteract the influence of the Surrealist group. The first exhibition of British abstract art was held in London in 1935. By the early 1940s the main movements in modern art, expressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism, and dada were represented in New York. Many artists fled Europe to the United States. Artists like Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Ernst, were just a few of the exiled Europeans who arrived in New York in those years. Expressionist artists believed that art should convey feelings rather than the real world.

John Marin (1870-1953) was one of the first American artists to make abstract paintings. He is credited with influencing the abstract expressionists. The best known abstract expressionists were Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Arshile Gorky. It is considered that the style of de Kooning came to be referred as Abstract expressionism, and the New York School.

Lyrical Abstraction is an art movement born in Paris after World War II. Georges Mathieu, a French painter, gained international reputation in the 1950s in this style. Some other notable painters of this style are: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Frank Kupka, Robert Delaunay, Mordecai Ardon, Norman Bluhm, Jean René Bazaine, Hans Hartung, Wols, Max Bill, Gunther Gerzso, Huguette Arthur Bertrand, Georges Mathieu, Jean Miotte, Ronnie Landfield and Stefan Fiedorowicz.