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Thursday, 11 April 2013

Abstract In Art Pictures Galleries Wallpaper Paintings

Abstract In Art Definition

Source(Google.com.pk)
Abstract in art:
Before there was an art of abstract painting, it was already widely believed that the value of a
picture was a matter of colors and shapes alone. Music and architecture were constantly held up to
painters as examples of a pure art which did not have to imitate objects but derived its effects from
elements peculiar to itself. But such ideas could not be readily accepted, since no one had yet seen a
painting made up of colors and shapes, representing nothing. If pictures of the objects around us
were often judged according to qualities of form alone, it was obvious that in doing so one was
distorting or reducing the pictures; you could not arrive at these paintings simply by manipulating
forms. And in so far as the objects to which these forms belonged were often particular individuals
and places, real or mythical figures, bearing the evident marks of a time, the pretension that art was
above history through the creative energy or personality of the artist was not entirely clear. In
abstract art, however, the pretended autonomy and absoluteness of the aesthetic emerged in a
concrete form. Here, finally, was an art of painting in which only aesthetic elements seem to be
present.
Abstract art had therefore the value of a practical demonstration. In these new paintings the
very processes of designing and inventing seemed to have been brought on to the canvas; the pure
form once masked by an extraneous content was liberated and could now be directly perceived.
Painters who do not practice this art have welcomed it on just this ground, that it strengthened their
conviction of the absoluteness of the aesthetic and provided them a discipline in pure design. Their
attitude toward past art was also completely changed. The new styles accustomed painters to the
vision of colors and shapes as disengaged from objects and created an immense confraternity of
works of art, cutting across the barriers of time and place. They made it possible to enjoy the
remotest arts, those in which the represented objects were no longer intelligible, even the drawings
of children and madmen, and especially primitive arts with drastically distorted figures, which had
been regarded as artless curios even by insistently aesthetic critics. Before this time Ruskin could
say in his Political Economy of Art, in calling for the preservation of medieval and Renaissance
works that "in Europe alone, pure and precious ancient art exists, for there is none in America, none
in Asia, none in Africa." What was once considered monstrous, now became pure form and pure
expression, the aesthetic evidence that in art feeling and thought are prior to the represented world.
The art of the whole world was now available on a single unhistorical and universal plane as a
panorama of the formalizing energies of man.
These two aspects of abstract painting, the exclusion of natural forms and the unhistorical
universalizing of the qualities of art, have a crucial importance for the general theory of art. Just as
the discovery of non-Euclidian geometry gave a powerful impetus to the view that mathematics was
independent of experience, so abstract painting cut at the roots of the classic ideas of artistic
imitation. The analogy of mathematics was in fact present to the minds of the apologists of abstractart; they have often referred to non-Euclidian geometry in defense of their own position, and have
even suggested an historical connection between them.
Today the abstractionists and their Surrealist offspring are more and more concerned with
objects and the older claims of abstract art have lost the original force of insurgent convictions.
Painters who had once upheld this art as the logical goal of the entire history of forms have refuted
themselves in returning to the impure natural forms. The demands for liberty in art are no longer
directed against a fettering tradition of nature; the aesthetic of abstraction has itself become a brake
on new movements. Not that abstract art is dead, as its philistine enemies have been announcing for
over twenty years; it is still practiced by some of the finest painters and sculptors in Europe, whose
work shows a freshness and assurance that are lacking in the newest realistic art. The conception of
a possible field of "pure art"—whatever its value—will not die so soon, though it may take on
forms different from those of the last thirty years; and very likely the art that follows in the
countries which have known abstraction will be affected by it. The ideas underlying abstract art
have penetrated deeply into all artistic theory, even of their original opponents; the language of
absolutes and pure sources of art, whether of feeling, reason, intuition or the sub-conscious mind,
appears in the very schools which renounce abstraction. "Objective" painters strive for "pure
objectivity," for the object given in its "essence" and completeness, without respect to a view point,
and the Surrealists derive their images from pure thought, freed from the perversions of reason and
everyday experience. Very little is written today—sympathetic to modern art—which does not
employ this language of absolutes.
In this article I shall take as my point of departure Barr's recent book,1
the best, I think, that
we have in English on the movements now grouped as abstract art. It has the special interestof
combining a discussion of general questions about the nature of this art, its aesthetic theories, its
causes, and even the relation to political movements, with a detailed, matter-of-fact account of the
different styles. But although Barr sets out to describe rather than to defend or to criticize abstract
art, he seems to accept its theories on their face value in his historical exposition and in certain
random judgments. In places he speaks of this art as independent of historical conditions, as
realizing the underlying order of nature and as an art of pure form without content.
Hence if the book is largely an account of historical movements, Barr's conception of
abstract art remains essentially unhistorical. He gives us, it is true, the dates of every stage in the
various movements, as if to enable us to plot a curve, or to follow the emergence of the art year by
year, but no connection is drawn between the art and the conditions of the moment. He excludes as
irrelevant to its history the nature of the society in which it arose, except as an incidental obstructing
or accelerating atmospheric factor. The history of modern art is presented as an internal, immanent
process among the artists; abstract art arises because, as the author says, representational art had
been exhausted. Out of boredom with "painting facts," the artists turned to abstract art as a pure
aesthetic activity. "By a common and powerful impulse they were driven to abandon the imitation
of natural appearance" just as the artists of the fifteenth century "were moved by a passion for
imitating nature." The modern change, however, was "the logical and inevitable conclusion toward
which art was moving.