Universal Principles of Art

1 ABSTRACTION

THE DISTANCING OF AN IDEA FROM OBJECTIVE REFERENTS

Abstract, or nonrepresentational art, emerged in the early twentieth century as a radical idea. When used in philosophy, the word refers to the distancing of an idea from objective referents so that it becomes a distillation of thought. Abstraction came about in art through a similar process of distancing, as various artists began to present simplified, or distilled, notions of the objective world.

A series of art movements—starting with Impressionism in the 1870s and continuing through Postimpressionism to Cubism in the 1920s—gradually shifted the focus in art away from the task of representation and toward the making of artworks that were entirely autonomous. As early as 1907, ...