December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
3h 39m
English
In abstract or nonrepresentational art, the artwork becomes its own subject.
• In philosophy, abstraction refers to the distancing of an idea from objective referents so that it becomes a distillation of thought. Abstract art came about through a similar process of distancing, as various artists began to present simplified, or distilled, notions of the objective world.
• Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) gradually simplified representational motifs in his work until they became compositions of autonomous floating forms by 1912.
• Jean (Hans) Arp (1866–1966) cut out amorphous forms in wood to make nonobjective sculpted reliefs from 1916 onward.
• Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), leader of the Russian Suprematist movement, made ...