abstract painting

Many artists experimented with colors in their abstract canvas paintings. German Expressionism, for example, was characterized by its vivid palette and their correspondence to human feelings. Wassily Kandinsky, a well-known German Expressionist, believed art should function like music, expressing inner emotion without representing the real world.

Fauvism depicted objects with intense arbitrary color, while Orphism was characterized by bright patches of color rather than a figurative subject. The rejection of three-dimensional perspective was also crucial to abstract art paintings.

Cubism, with its flattened perspective of objects, paved the way for pure abstract painting in this sense. Russian Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich furthered this flatness by placing flat colorful shapes on pure white backgrounds in his works, and De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian painted flat grids in red, blue, yellow, white, and black. Surrealist painters, who were concerned with tapping into the subconscious, created biomorphic shapes and organic lines, channeling the imaginative drawings of a child.

Abstract expressionists approach abstract paintings by experimenting with gesture. These works were called action paintings because they served as a document of the painters’ literal actions, be it walking around the canvas dripping paint a la Pollock or revealing the aggressive brushstrokes of Willem de Kooning. As with other abstract movements, these painters emphasized color and how the work corresponds with their own inner emotions over shape or form.


abstract painting

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