What Is Abstract Art? A Guide to Non-Representational Painting

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), a Russian painter, printmaker, stage designer, and theorist, is widely regarded as the father of abstract art who pioneered the transition from representational to non-objective painting; his unique gift of synesthesia allowed him to hear colors and see sounds, which he exploited to create an aesthetic experience that engaged sight, sound, and emotions simultaneously, believing that total abstraction offered profound transcendental expression that copying from nature interfered with; his visual vocabulary developed through three phases—from early representative canvases with divine symbolism to rapturous operatic compositions to late geometric and biomorphic flat plains of color—and his 1912 book 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art' became the first theoretical foundation of abstractionism, establishing that artistic self-expression is truly the development of one's spirit and freeing art from traditional bonds to material reality.

Wassily Kandinsky, born in Moscow, studied law before attending an exhibition of Monet's haystacks at age 30, which disturbed him because he couldn't recognize what he was seeing yet couldn't erase the image from his mind. This experience led him to abandon law and move to Munich in 1896. Influenced by theosophy (creation as geometric progression from a single point), he wrote 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art' (1910). By 1915, his work had become completely abstract with titles no longer naming subjects. He taught at the Bauhaus between 1922-1933, developing color theory and form theory. His famous quote 'color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano' expressed his belief that art should evoke spiritual vibrations in the soul.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter who worked primarily in Germany from a young age. His age placed him closer to Fauvist and Post-Impressionist painters. His artistic evolution was more radical than his contemporaries, covering the entire first half of the 20th century. During his abstract painting research (1915-1918), the Russian Revolution occurred, creating a context where the new Soviet regime sought to transform all aspects of life, including art, requiring something completely new created from scratch. Unlike Malevich, whose writings were often incomprehensible, Kandinsky was an excellent writer and great pedagogue who explained his ideas clearly and published several highly influential books. He began as a Fauvist painter, using completely acidic, absolutely expressive colors with no connection to reality. His early abstract works (around 1911-1913) were called 'Compositions' - a title reflecting the idea of an articulation of figures and interrelation of figures, similar to musical composition. This represented a first step toward abstraction: separating color from reality and using color for its own values. Kandinsky's transition to abstraction occurred around 1912-1913. He recounts an anecdote about his creative transformation: while painting his fourth composition, he experienced a creative crisis. When he returned home, he found his wife had turned the canvas 180 degrees. He discovered that the reversed painting was much more beautiful than the original, which still had connections to nature. When turned, those connections disappeared and it became a pure composition of colors and lines - an autonomous reality beautiful in itself. In his influential book 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art,' Kandinsky presents two fundamental ideas: first, he critiques the traditional Western perspective of representation (valid for 400 years since the Renaissance) as neither universal nor valid for representing the spiritual and psychological changes occurring at the beginning of the 20th century; second, he argues that painting must change to focus on representing spiritual and psychological values of human beings. Color becomes the fundamental element of pictorial language because it can be infinitely nuanced and has the power to directly impact the viewer's psychology and spirit. Each color has specific characteristics that affect our psychology - bright colors inquiet, blues tranquilize, reds impact strongly. This parallels music, which can also be graded and arranged in compositions to represent many moods and situations. Kandinsky established a parallel between painting as color and music as tone, both capable of directly impacting our emotional state. He experienced synesthesia - the confusion of different senses where he could 'hear' music when looking at colors and 'see' colors when hearing music. This synesthetic experience influenced his approach to abstract painting, where he associated each pictorial tonality with different musical tonalities, creating harmony or tension through this shared vocabulary.

Kandinsky attached theory to all of his abstract work. In 1911, he wrote concerning the spiritual in art, arguing that art should move away from materialism and imitation of nature toward expressing pure spirituality. He explained the psychological impact of different colors, claiming that abstract art freed from depicting the external world can more directly resonate with viewers and awaken a deeper spiritual experience. Kandinsky's work paved the way for abstract movements including Abstract Expressionism with Pollock and Rothko, and geometric abstraction with Mondrian and Malevich.

Wassily Kandinsky pioneered spiritual abstraction, believing art should connect with the spiritual realm rather than the sensory world. He was synesthetic, associating colors with musical instruments and composing paintings like musical scores. He wrote 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art,' arguing that color affects the human soul. His goal was to move beyond painting the sensible world toward expressing spiritual truths, creating what is called lyrical or spiritual abstraction.

Formal analysis is a three-step methodology (identify, analyze, interpret) that art historians use to interpret modern and abstract art by examining visual elements such as line, shape, color, space, scale, and texture, rather than relying on subjective meaning; this approach helps overcome the natural human tendency called 'semel vice reflex' to reject unfamiliar non-representational art by providing an educated framework for understanding artistic choices.

In non-representational art, the subject matter is the relationship between the artist's body, the instrument used, the canvas size, and the objects created. This includes how movements reveal the artist's body size, how instrument size relates to images created, and how objects relate to each other and surface boundaries. These relationships are everything that non-representational work is about - it's an exercise in dialing in these dimensions to create satisfying compositions.

Art historians employ three fundamental approaches to understand artworks: formal analysis examines physical characteristics like scale, material, value, and composition; subject matter analysis explores depicted narratives; and contextual analysis investigates historical circumstances. Formal properties—observable features such as oil paint on canvas, light-dark contrasts, and compositional arrangements—reveal artistic decisions. Composition functions as visual stage direction, guiding viewer attention through strategic placement of figures and use of diagonal lines. Artists create spatial illusions through multiple techniques: receding diagonals, light placement, detail reduction, and scale differences. These formal elements work together to transform flat surfaces into convincing representations of three-dimensional space.

Formal analysis provides a systematic approach to describing artworks through specific visual criteria including line, shape, texture, space, color, value, composition, balance, proportion, scale, rhythm, emphasis, and unity. This method deliberately excludes iconography, symbolism, patronage history, political and social context, and artist intention, focusing exclusively on observable visual properties. The analytical process progresses through three stages: description/naming (identifying elements), interpretation/relationship of parts (understanding artistic management of materials), and judgment/criticism (evaluating quality). Only the first stage constitutes formal analysis proper, while interpretation and judgment represent distinct analytical approaches.

Visual analysis in art history involves examining paintings through specific formal elements including scale, composition, pictorial space, form, line, color, light, tone, texture, and pattern to understand how artists create visual meaning and emotional impact, rather than focusing on iconography, symbolism, or historical context.

In art history, abstraction had specific trajectories—particularly in the 20th century, it came as a way to counter representation (figurative, naturalistic, realistic art). Artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock created abstract, non-representational art. Over time, abstraction has shifted from being anti-representation to being concrete—presenting something materially present in a space rather than representing something else. In digital media environments, data abstraction is taking the place of representation, where things are rendered into statistics, numbers, and codes that become representative. The artist explains that when learning photography, she was told to follow a singular line of execution throughout her entire practice, but she and other artists don't work this way, which is why she calls her practice abstract. The artist acknowledges that photography carries a burden from its history of being representational—capturing some sense of truth—but she and other artists are not interested in the genres by which truth has been painted for a long time.

Abstract art is also called non-objective or non-representational art, where nothing has a correspondent in the concrete world. Origins are in impressionism, post-impressionism, and fovism (1874-1905). Cubism demonstrated reality can be presented very distorted. With futurism, when artists began representing kinematics and movement, we had a full leap into abstraction. The painter is a priest of the image who must walk on a limit—too normal means being stuck, too extreme means being crazy. There are multiple European currents, with history starting from Kandinsky's L'Esprit, having Dutch versions and multiple versions including dadaism. Romanian artists with Semitic origins like Marcel Iancu and Victor Brauner were representatives in surrealism, while abstract expressionism is owed to Jackson Pollock and his generation.

Abstract art is not merely a Western modernist movement but a global phenomenon with deep roots in non-Western traditions such as Islamic geometric ornamentation, East Asian calligraphy, and indigenous textile patterns, and it operates through five interconnected thematic categories—bodies, landscapes, cosmologies, architecture, and man-made artifacts—that artists worldwide have explored simultaneously rather than sequentially, challenging the conventional Western narrative that frames abstraction as a linear progression from European avant-garde movements.

The exhibition continued to explore the abstraction versus representation debate throughout contemporary works, examining how artists challenge traditional definitions of what constitutes abstract painting. The Contemporary Art Center served as the main container for approximately 30 contemporary artists. The third floor represented a shift from regional specificity to international scope, a Tower of Babel approach. Film and video were explored as the universal language of contemporary art, demonstrated through works by Push Pamala from Southern India who inserts herself into Bollywood images, and Peter Hugo who makes photographs of Nollywood (the Nigerian Hollywood system). Maryel and Carol is an installation dealing with the history of being wired in a specific neighborhood of New Orleans where access has been cut off by the interstate highway. Carrie James Marshall's window installation is about the history of a big department store in New Orleans and its segregated history.

Visual literacy provides vocabulary to describe art appearances, enabling clear thinking and accurate critique. Art exists on a continuum from representational to non-representational. Representational art refers to real-world figures or objects, including photorealistic (photographic clarity), naturalistic (lifelike proportions), illusionistic (trompe l'oeil), idealized (cultural beauty standards), and stylized (preset conventions like Egyptian and Japanese woodblock traditions). Abstract art distorts real-world forms, potentially becoming non-representational. Non-representational (nonobjective) art does not relate to real-world forms, focusing on shapes, colors, and lines. Artists like Mondrian and Kandinsky pioneered this approach, with Kandinsky comparing non-representational art to instrumental music creating experience without narrative.