MY THOUGHTS ON ABSTRACT ART

Contemporary art in the forms we would recognise as abstraction, has been around a long time now. At the turn of the 20th century,the world was becoming increasingly modernistic. Steamships, cars, and trains allowed international travel,  telephones, and radios gave access for conversations from opposite ends of the world.
 Art journals thrived; in Paris alone, some 200 reviews of art and culture appeared before  World War I. Subscribers came from across the cultured world, allowing people to stay abreast of the latest developments in art. It also saw the beginning of  traveling exhibitions, one in particular by the Italian abstract Futurists.

While Kandinsky is today hailed as the founder of abstract painting, he was not the only one in the development of non-realistic painting. Czech, František Kupka was the first to display paintings that were a complete break from representational art.

At the time,French Impressionists were considered childish daubings, but we now consider them as beautiful and atmospheric. Although artists around that time such as Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh are not total abstraction by our eyes, they were all breaking new ground,away from the stale art of the salons.

I find it difficult looking at Contemporary art, when all it consists of are a few streaks of colour, or texture, or a real unmade bed or pile of bricks. I am not going to knock this form of personal expression, just because I don’t understand it. However when an artist has to produce reams of explanation, it makes me wonder why they don’t just leave the artwork out and write instead. I suppose in time the good, groundbreaking stuff will survive,the rest will fade away. The big business side, and the incredible prices paid at auctions for modern art has done much harm to general creativity.

I suppose that all art is just a false depiction,just a representation, and thus is an abstraction.  So even Rembrandt and John Constable were abstract painters.