Abstractionism: A Practical Guide to Abstract Art

A closer look

The new banner develops a visual passage from a recognisable vessel and landscape suggestion toward increasingly independent colour shapes. Shared curves and intervals connect the sections. It is an original teaching illustration, not a diagram of art history or a reproduction of a recognised painter’s work.

Abstraction is a range of decisions

A drawing can simplify a tree while remaining recognisably a tree. Another work may offer no stable object to identify. Both can involve abstraction, but in different degrees and with different aims. Ask what has been retained, altered or set aside rather than treating recognition as an all-or-nothing test.

The word “nonobjective” is useful when a work does not set out to represent an external object, although artists and historians do not always use these terms identically. A careful description explains the particular work before relying on a category. “There is no recognisable figure” is an observation; “therefore it means nothing” is an unsupported conclusion.

Nor does abstraction mean the artist abandoned every relationship with the world. Music, architecture, landscape, movement and lived experience can inform a work without appearing as illustrated subjects. The connection may be structural, emotional or conceptual rather than a resemblance.

Two documented works, two kinds of rhythm

MoMA’s account of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) connects its segmented grid with the artist’s enthusiasm for New York and boogie-woogie music. The painting’s small blocks and intervals create a rhythm without depicting a street scene. It is a specific example of how an abstract arrangement can remain connected to an experienced world. [1]

The Guggenheim’s teaching guide presents Vasily Kandinsky’s Composition 8 (1923) through circles, lines, geometric forms and their relationships. Compared with Mondrian’s constrained grid, it offers a useful opportunity to examine differences in direction, scale and balance. These two works should not be reduced to the same formula merely because both are abstract. [2]

Look at the museum images before reading further interpretation. Track one line, find the largest quiet area and compare the smallest colour accent with the dominant shape. This sequence gives your response something visible to stand on.

Describe what the work actually does

Begin with scale and placement. A small dark form near an edge behaves differently from the same form in the centre. It may create tension, imply continuation beyond the frame or pull attention away from a larger area. There is no universal rule that the largest object must be the most important.

Then examine edges. Hard boundaries can make shapes feel cut or measured; broken boundaries can suggest touch, weathering or movement. Neither is inherently more expressive. The question is how the edge relates to the rest of the picture.

Colour also acts through relationships. A muted patch can become active beside a neutral field; several brilliant colours can cancel one another’s emphasis. Instead of writing that a painting “uses vibrant colours to evoke emotion,” name the contrast and explain what it makes your eye do.

Avoid the shortcut history

A broad field cannot be explained well by attaching a few famous names to a story about one inventor and one date. Different practices, locations and networks require their own accounts. This entry offers a way into looking; its named examples are not an exhaustive genealogy.

Abstract Expressionism, geometric abstraction and Abstract Illusionism identify more specific contexts or approaches. Use those terms when they clarify the work being discussed. Calling every nonliteral image “Abstract Expressionism” turns a historical label into a synonym for colourful paint.

Our banner demonstrates a possible exercise rather than a necessary progression. The recognisable vessel does not become more advanced or valuable as it becomes less recognisable. Each stage offers a different visual problem.

Make three versions and compare them

Choose a bowl, branch or view through a window. In the first study, preserve its outline but simplify the interior. In the second, retain only three large shapes. In the third, rearrange those shapes according to rhythm rather than resemblance. Keep the palette consistent so that you can judge the structural changes.

With an image model, specify these decisions instead of requesting “abstract art” alone. Review the result at thumbnail size and full size. Identify one relationship worth keeping and one that feels arbitrary. Abstraction becomes more useful when it is a practice of attention rather than permission to stop looking.