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50-508: Three Forms (BH 72) is an abstract sculpture by Barbara Hepworth , completed in 1935. The sculpture was one of the first works completed by Hepworth after the birth of her triplets with Ben Nicholson in October 1934. It marks a point of departure in her style: her earlier abstract works are based on the human form, but Three Forms is more purely abstract, reduced to simple geometric shapes with little colour. Her subsequent work continued in

100-853: A Circle (1911); František Kupka had painted the Orphist works, Discs of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colors ), 1912 and Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs ( Fugue in Two Colors ), 1912; Robert Delaunay painted a series entitled Simultaneous Windows and Formes Circulaires, Soleil n°2 (1912–13); Léopold Survage created Colored Rhythm (Study for the film), 1913; Piet Mondrian , painted Tableau No. 1 and Composition No. 11 , 1913. With his expressive use of color and his free and imaginative drawing Henri Matisse comes very close to pure abstraction in French Window at Collioure (1914), View of Notre-Dame (1914), and The Yellow Curtain from 1915. And

150-493: A French painter in the classical style whose work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color, served as an alternative to the more narrative Baroque style of the 17th century. He was a major inspiration for such classically oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David , Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cézanne . The rise of the Neoclassical art of Jacques-Louis David ultimately engendered

200-507: A basis for a diversity of modes of abstraction. The following extract from The World Backwards gives some impression of the inter-connectedness of culture at the time: " David Burliuk 's knowledge of modern art movements must have been extremely up-to-date, for the second Knave of Diamonds exhibition , held in January 1912 (in Moscow) included not only paintings sent from Munich, but some members of

250-417: A continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is impossible. Artwork which takes liberties, e.g. altering color or form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction , for instance, one

300-715: A few directions relating to abstraction in the second half of the 20th century. In the United States, Art as Object as seen in the Minimalist sculpture of Donald Judd and the paintings of Frank Stella are seen today as newer permutations. Other examples include Lyrical Abstraction and the sensuous use of color seen in the work of painters as diverse as Robert Motherwell , Patrick Heron , Kenneth Noland , Sam Francis , Cy Twombly , Richard Diebenkorn , Helen Frankenthaler , Joan Mitchell , and Veronica Ruiz de Velasco . One socio-historical explanation that has been offered for

350-799: A few of the exiled Europeans who arrived in New York. The rich cultural influences brought by the European artists were distilled and built upon by local New York painters. The climate of freedom in New York allowed all of these influences to flourish. The art galleries that primarily had focused on European art began to notice the local art community and the work of younger American artists who had begun to mature. Certain artists at this time became distinctly abstract in their mature work. During this period Piet Mondrian's painting Composition No. 10 , 1939–1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black grid lines clearly defined his radical but classical approach to

400-500: A manifesto defining an abstract art in which the line, color and surface only are the concrete reality. Abstraction-Création founded in 1931 as a more open group, provided a point of reference for abstract artists, as the political situation worsened in 1935, and artists again regrouped, many in London. The first exhibition of British abstract art was held in England in 1935. The following year

450-456: A more formal, abstract and non-representational vein. Hepworth wrote in 1952 that she became "absorbed in the relationships in space, in size and texture and weight, as well as the tensions between forms". The work consists of three rounded elements positioned on a flat rectangular base, all in polished Seravezza marble (largely white, but small brown marks, grey flecks, and pale grey graining are visible on close inspection). Each element has

500-520: A need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology , science and philosophy . The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time. Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete. Abstraction exists along

550-399: A precise shape and size, and they are arranged in a similarly precise triangular relationship. The original base has been replaced, but the spatial arrangement of each element remains the same, with a spherical element placed at a distance from two larger and elongated oval forms, the smaller of which lies flat and the larger of which rests on its long edge, both aligned with the longer edge of

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600-407: A technician, learning to use the tools and materials of modern production. Art into life! was Vladimir Tatlin 's slogan, and that of all the future Constructivists. Varvara Stepanova and Alexandre Exter and others abandoned easel painting and diverted their energies to theatre design and graphic works. On the other side stood Kazimir Malevich , Anton Pevsner and Naum Gabo . They argued that art

650-558: A view from a single point, with modulated color in flat areas – became the basis of a new visual art, later to be developed into Cubism . Additionally in the late 19th century in Eastern Europe mysticism and early modernist religious philosophy as expressed by theosophist Mme. Blavatsky had a profound impact on pioneer geometric artists like Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky . The mystical teaching of Georges Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky also had an important influence on

700-452: Is clearly derived from real object sources and so is, by definition, representational . The term is often in contrast to abstract art : Since the arrival of abstract art the term figurative has been used to refer to any form of modern art that retains strong references to the real world. Painting and sculpture can therefore be divided into the categories of figurative, representational and abstract, although, strictly speaking, abstract art

750-439: Is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism , which alters the forms of the real-life entities depicted. Patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable of providing a livelihood for artists. Three art movements which contributed to the development of abstract art were Romanticism , Impressionism and Expressionism . Artistic independence for artists

800-457: Is dependent, include line , shape , color , light and dark , mass , volume , texture , and perspective , although these elements of design could also play a role in creating other types of imagery—for instance abstract, or non-representational or non-objective two-dimensional artwork. The difference is that in figurative art these elements are deployed to create an impression or illusion of form and space, and, usually, to create emphasis in

850-476: Is derived (or abstracted) from a figurative or other natural source. However, "abstract" is sometimes used as a synonym of non-representational art and non-objective art, i.e. art which has no derivation from figures or objects. Figurative art is not synonymous with figure painting (art that represents the human figure), although human and animal figures are frequent subjects. The formal elements, those aesthetic effects created by design, upon which figurative art

900-511: Is then precisely the abstract nature of social existence—legal formalities, bureaucratic impersonalization, information/power—in the world of late modernity . By contrast, Post-Jungians would see the quantum theories with their disintegration of conventional ideas of form and matter as underlying the divorce of the concrete and the abstract in modern art. Figurative art Figurative art , sometimes written as figurativism , describes artwork (particularly paintings and sculptures) that

950-424: Is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive . But figurative and representational (or realistic ) art often contain partial abstraction. Both geometric abstraction and lyrical abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color

1000-654: The Abstract expressionists and the New York School . In New York City there was an atmosphere which encouraged discussion and there was a new opportunity for learning and growing. Artists and teachers John D. Graham and Hans Hofmann became important bridge figures between the newly arrived European Modernists and the younger American artists coming of age. Mark Rothko , born in Russia, began with strongly surrealist imagery which later dissolved into his powerful color compositions of

1050-456: The Bauhaus . By the mid-1920s the revolutionary period (1917 to 1921) when artists had been free to experiment was over; and by the 1930s only socialist realism was allowed. As visual art becomes more abstract, it develops some characteristics of music : an art form which uses the abstract elements of sound and divisions of time. Wassily Kandinsky , himself an amateur musician, was inspired by

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1100-565: The Bauhaus went to America. During the 1930s Paris became the host to artists from Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries affected by the rise of totalitarianism . Sophie Tauber and Jean Arp collaborated on paintings and sculpture using organic/geometric forms. The Polish Katarzyna Kobro applied mathematically based ideas to sculpture. The many types of abstraction now in close proximity led to attempts by artists to analyse

1150-628: The German Die Brücke group, while from Paris came work by Robert Delaunay , Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger , as well as Picasso. During the Spring David Burliuk gave two lectures on cubism and planned a polemical publication, which the Knave of Diamonds was to finance. He went abroad in May and came back determined to rival the almanac Der Blaue Reiter which had emerged from the printers while he

1200-527: The Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism . The raw language of color as developed by the Fauves directly influenced another pioneer of abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky . Cubism , based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to cube , sphere and cone became, along with Fauvism , the art movement that directly opened

1250-538: The ancient wisdom of the sacred books of India and China in the early years of the century. It was in this context that Piet Mondrian , Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint and other artists working towards an 'objectless state' became interested in the occult as a way of creating an 'inner' object. The universal and timeless shapes found in geometry : the circle, square and triangle become the spatial elements in abstract art; they are, like color, fundamental systems underlying visible reality. The Bauhaus at Weimar, Germany

1300-661: The depiction of objects. Even earlier than that, with her "spirit" drawings, Georgiana Houghton 's choice to work with abstract shapes correlate with the unnatural nature of her subject, in a time when abstraction was not yet a concept (she organized an exhibit in 1871). Expressionist painters explored the bold use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations, and intense color. Expressionists produced emotionally charged paintings that were reactions to and perceptions of contemporary experience; and reactions to Impressionism and other more conservative directions of late 19th-century painting. The Expressionists drastically changed

1350-429: The door to abstraction in the early 20th century. During the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or , where František Kupka exhibited his abstract painting Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs ( Fugue in Two Colors ) (1912), the poet Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists including Robert Delaunay , Orphism . He defined it as, "the art of painting new structures out of elements that have not been borrowed from

1400-702: The early 1950s. The expressionistic gesture and the act of painting itself, became of primary importance to Jackson Pollock , Robert Motherwell , and Franz Kline . While during the 1940s Arshile Gorky 's and Willem de Kooning 's figurative work evolved into abstraction by the end of the decade. New York City became the center, and artists worldwide gravitated towards it; from other places in America as well. Digital art , hard-edge painting , geometric abstraction , minimalism , lyrical abstraction , op art, abstract expressionism, color field painting, monochrome painting , assemblage , neo-Dada, shaped canvas painting, are

1450-582: The early Renaissance, Mannerism and the Baroque through 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century painting Figurative art has steadily broadened its parameters. An important landmark in the evolution of figurative art is the first known reclining nude in Western painting in Sleeping Venus (1510) by Giorgione . It introduced the female nude as subject and started a long line of famous paintings. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665),

1500-410: The early formations of the geometric abstract styles of Piet Mondrian and his colleagues in the early 20th century. The spiritualism also inspired the abstract art of Kasimir Malevich and František Kupka . At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque , André Derain , Raoul Dufy and Jean Metzinger revolutionized

1550-413: The elements are all positively curved , and suggested that the work could have been improved by the sphere being replaced by a cylinder. The whole work measures 21 × 53.2 × 34.3 centimetres (8.3 × 20.9 × 13.5 in) and weighs 23 kilograms (51 lb). It was exhibited at the "7&5" exhibition in 1935 and the "Abstract and Concrete Art" exhibition in 1936. It

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1600-460: The emphasis on subject matter in favor of the portrayal of psychological states of being. Although artists like Edvard Munch and James Ensor drew influences principally from the work of the Post-Impressionists they were instrumental to the advent of abstraction in the 20th century. Paul Cézanne had begun as an Impressionist but his aim – to make a logical construction of reality based on

1650-431: The growing prevalence of the abstract in modern art—an explanation linked to the name of Theodor W. Adorno —is that such abstraction is a response to (and a reflection of) the growing abstraction of social relations in industrial society . Frederic Jameson similarly sees modernist abstraction as a function of the abstract power of money, equating all things equally as exchange-values. The social content of abstract art

1700-585: The memory-based clarity of imagery in Egyptian art . Eventually idealization gave way to observation, and a figurative art which balanced ideal geometry with greater realism was seen in Classical sculpture by 480 B.C. The Greeks referred to the reliance on visual observation as mimesis . Until the time of the Impressionists , figurative art was characterized by attempts to reconcile these opposing principles. From

1750-861: The more international Abstract and Concrete exhibition was organized by Nicolete Gray including work by Piet Mondrian , Joan Miró , Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson . Hepworth, Nicholson and Gabo moved to the St. Ives in Cornwall to continue their constructivist work. During the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s many artists fled Europe to the United States. By the early 1940s the main movements in modern art, expressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism , and dada were represented in New York: Marcel Duchamp , Fernand Léger , Piet Mondrian , Jacques Lipchitz , André Masson , Max Ernst , and André Breton , were just

1800-412: The narrative portrayed. Figurative art is itself based upon a tacit understanding of abstracted shapes: the figure sculpture of Greek antiquity was not naturalistic , for its forms were idealized and geometric . Ernst Gombrich referred to the strictures of this schematic imagery, the adherence to that which was already known, rather than that which is seen, as the "Egyptian method", an allusion to

1850-419: The possibility of marks and associative color resounding in the soul. The idea had been put forward by Charles Baudelaire , that all our senses respond to various stimuli but the senses are connected at a deeper aesthetic level. Closely related to this, is the idea that art has The spiritual dimension and can transcend 'every-day' experience, reaching a spiritual plane. The Theosophical Society popularized

1900-457: The rectangle and abstract art in general. Some artists of the period defied categorization, such as Georgia O'Keeffe who, while a modernist abstractionist, was a pure maverick in that she painted highly abstract forms while not joining any specific group of the period. Eventually American artists who were working in a great diversity of styles began to coalesce into cohesive stylistic groups. The best-known group of American artists became known as

1950-477: The rectangular base. The 12 centimetres (4.7 in) diameter of the sphere reflects one of the dimensions of both larger elements, each of which also shares a dimension of 18 centimetres (7.1 in) (1.5 times as large). The medium spheroid measures 8.5 × 18 × 12 centimetres (3.3 × 7.1 × 4.7 in) and the larger one is 18 × 25.5 × 12 centimetres (7.1 × 10.0 × 4.7 in). Each object

2000-449: The school was moved to Dessau and, as the Nazi party gained control in 1932, The Bauhaus was closed. In 1937 an exhibition of degenerate art , 'Entartete Kunst' contained all types of avant-garde art disapproved of by the Nazi party. Then the exodus began: not just from the Bauhaus but from Europe in general; to Paris, London and America. Paul Klee went to Switzerland but many of the artists at

2050-602: The search continued: The Rayist (Luchizm) drawings of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov , used lines like rays of light to make a construction. Kasimir Malevich completed his first entirely abstract work, the Suprematist , Black Square , in 1915. Another of the Suprematist group' Liubov Popova , created the Architectonic Constructions and Spatial Force Constructions between 1916 and 1921. Piet Mondrian

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2100-532: The various conceptual and aesthetic groupings. An exhibition by forty-six members of the Cercle et Carré group organized by Joaquín Torres-García assisted by Michel Seuphor contained work by the Neo-Plasticists as well as abstractionists as varied as Kandinsky, Anton Pevsner and Kurt Schwitters . Criticized by Theo van Doesburg to be too indefinite a collection he published the journal Art Concret setting out

2150-463: The visual sphere, but had been created entirely by the artist...it is a pure art." Since the turn of the century, cultural connections between artists of the major European cities had become extremely active as they strove to create an art form equal to the high aspirations of modernism . Ideas were able to cross-fertilize by means of artist's books, exhibitions and manifestos so that many sources were open to experimentation and discussion, and formed

2200-628: Was advanced during the 19th century. An objective interest in what is seen can be discerned from the paintings of John Constable , J. M. W. Turner , Camille Corot and from them to the Impressionists who continued the plein air painting of the Barbizon school . Early intimations of a new art had been made by James McNeill Whistler who, in his painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket , (1872), placed greater emphasis on visual sensation than

2250-532: Was bought from Hepworth by Mr and Mrs JR Marcus Brumwell in late 1935, and they donated it to the Tate Gallery in 1964. It is now displayed at Tate Britain . Abstract art Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt

2300-672: Was essentially a spiritual activity; to create the individual's place in the world, not to organize life in a practical, materialistic sense. During that time, representatives of the Russian avant-garde collaborated with other Eastern European Constructivist artists, including Władysław Strzemiński , Katarzyna Kobro , and Henryk Stażewski . Many of those who were hostile to the materialist production idea of art left Russia. Anton Pevsner went to France, Gabo went first to Berlin, then to England and finally to America. Kandinsky studied in Moscow then left for

2350-428: Was evolving his abstract language, of horizontal and vertical lines with rectangles of color, between 1915 and 1919, Neo-Plasticism was the aesthetic which Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and other in the group De Stijl intended to reshape the environment of the future. Many of the abstract artists in Russia became Constructivists believing that art was no longer something remote, but life itself. The artist must become

2400-557: Was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius . The philosophy underlying the teaching program was unity of all the visual and plastic arts from architecture and painting to weaving and stained glass. This philosophy had grown from the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the Deutscher Werkbund . Among the teachers were Paul Klee , Wassily Kandinsky , Johannes Itten , Josef Albers , Anni Albers , and László Moholy-Nagy . In 1925

2450-563: Was in Germany". From 1909 to 1913 many experimental works in the search for this 'pure art' had been created by a number of artists: Francis Picabia painted Caoutchouc , c. 1909, The Spring , 1912, Dances at the Spring and The Procession, Seville , 1912; Wassily Kandinsky painted Untitled (First Abstract Watercolor) , 1913, Improvisation 21A , the Impression series, and Picture with

2500-499: Was shaped by hand and so is slightly imperfect. The choice of three forms - two alike and one different - may be connected with the birth of Hepworth's triplets - two girls and one boy. The abstract sculpture in a pure white recalls the contemporary architecture of Le Corbusier , and may also have been inspired by Hepworth's visits to the studios of Brancusi and Arp on a visit to France with Nicholson in 1932. Hepworth later accepted criticism from physicist John Desmond Bernal that

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