The painter wassily kandinsky is considered the founder of abstract art. He painted his first watercolor abstract Untitled en 1910. According to the philosopher Michel henry ; “Kandinsky calls abstract the content that the painting must express, that is to say this invisible life that we are. "

At the beginning of xx century, this term also included the cubism or futurism, movements in which there is a desire to represent the real world, without imitating or copying it, but rather by showing its intrinsic qualities. We represent what we know about an object rather than what we see of it.

Abstract art uses a formal, pictorial and linear language to create a composition independent of the relationship to visual references existing in the sensitive world. Western art has been, from the Renaissance until the middle of nineteenth century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce the illusion of visible reality. The discovery and growing access to arts and cultures outside Europe have infused other models of description and allowed a visual experience of the artist freed from the constraints of representation. Some, following an impressionist trend, have tried their hand at distorting modern printed characters, or even Sanskrit symbols. At the end of nineteenth century, many artists thus felt it necessary to create a new form of art assimilating the technological, scientific and philosophical changes of their time. The sources from which artists derive their theoretical arguments are diverse and reflect social and intellectual concerns in all areas of Western culture of the time.

Abstraction indicates a starting point, a new representation of reality and imagery in art. Since the realism of the beginning of nineteenth century and the appearance of daguerreotype, an exact representation of reality is achieved. The gap between art and reality, a classic theme of artistic representativeness, has passed through the mirror of visual accuracy. Abstraction is part of this continuity, this constant search for a fair representation of reality. It is intended as a response to these new forms recently appeared, considered despite their technical accuracy as partial, incomplete. The idea of ​​sublimation of reality disappears in favor of an abstraction external to its tangible representation, art no longer aims for the greatest plausibility, the most exact realism, because it can be supplanted, summarized, at least theoretically. by new forms of automated representation, since perfect representation is likely to be extremely difficult to achieve. Artistic work takes liberties, for example by changing color and form in a way that is visible and contained in a concise essence that can be called "abstract". The resultant no longer contains the traces of abstraction, the references and the recognizable disappear in favor of visible effects, geometric shapes, lines pure or abundant, colors unique or mixed. Thus, geometric abstraction does not retain any of the natural and realistic references of the entities presented. Figurative art and Total Abstraction are almost incompatible, except that figurative representation (or realist art) often contains partial abstraction.

Geometric abstraction and lyrical abstraction are most often totally abstract. Among the very many pre-abstraction artistic movements, those which embody a substantial and notable part of abstraction are the Fauvism, for its use of colors, clearly and deliberately altered from reality, and the cubism, which blatantly modifies the forms of real life. Finally futurism, in its desire to de-represent reality through dynamism and kinetics, achieves an abstract art, in particular with Giacomo Balla

Source: Extract from articles Wikipedia.

Fold back