Abstract art, also called nonobjective art or nonrepresentational art, painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays no part.
All art consists largely of elements that can be called abstract - ments of form, color, line, tone, and texture.
Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe, illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization - and exposition dominated over expressive function.
Abstract art has its origins in the 19th century.
The period characterized by so vast a body of elaborately representational art produced for the sake of illustrating anecdote also produced a number of painters who examined the mechanism of light and visual perception.

Robert Delaunay 1885-1941 - Le Premier Disque, 1912-1913
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Wassily Kandinsky - Color Study, Squares with Concentric Circles, 1913
The period of Romanticism had put forward ideas about art that denied classicism’s emphasis on imitation and idealization and had instead stressed the role of imagination and of the unconscious as the essential creative factors.
Gradually many painters of this period began to accept the new freedom and the new responsibilities implied in the coalescence of these attitudes.
Maurice Denis’s statement of 1890:
"It should be remembered that a picture - before being a war-horse, a figure, or an anecdote of some sort - is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order",
summarizes the feeling among the Symbolist and Postimpressionist artists of his time.
All the major movements of the first two decades of the 20th century, including Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, in some way emphasized the gap between art and natural appearances.
There is, however, a deep distinction between abstracting from appearances, even if to the point of unrecognizability, and making works of art out of forms not drawn from the visible world.
During the four or five years preceding World War I, such artists as Robert Delaunay, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin turned to fundamentally abstract art. -Kandinsky is generally regarded as having been the first modern artist to paint purely abstract pictures containing no recognizable objects, in 1910-1.
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Leonid Afremov
The majority of even the progressive artists regarded the abandonment of every degree of representation with disfavour, however.
During World War I the emergence of the de Stijl group in the Netherlands and of the Dada group in Zürich further widened the spectrum of abstract art.
Abstract art did not flourish between World Wars I and II. Beset by totalitarian politics and by art movements placing renewed emphasis on imagery, such as Surrealism and socially critical Realism, it received little notice.
But after World War II an energetic American school of abstract painting called Abstract Expressionism emerged and had wide influence.
Since the 1950s abstract art has been an accepted and widely practiced approach within European and American painting and sculpture.
Abstract art has puzzled and indeed confused many people, but for those who have accepted its nonreferential language there is no doubt as to its value and achievements. See also modern art. | © Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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Leonid Afremov
Abstract Artists at Tutt'Art@
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Leonid Afremov
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Wassily Kandinsky
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Leonid Afremov
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Megan Duncanson
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Leonid Afremov
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Wassily Kandinsky
Astrattismo - complesso delle ricerche che nel 20° sec. hanno teso deliberatamente a escludere ogni rapporto della forma artistica con gli aspetti del mondo naturale, basandosi esclusivamente sugli elementi specifici del proprio linguaggio (colore, forma, armonia, composizione).
Nell’astrattismo, benché sfumati in diverse correnti, si possono individuare due filoni portanti: l’astrattismo geometrico, che si fonda su una volontà di disciplina e rinnovamento estetico strutturato su basi di ordine intellettuale (costruttivismo, suprematismo, neoplasticismo, arte concreta, arte ottico-cinetica, minimalismo); l’astrattismo non geometrico, espressivo, che si basa sull’intuizione, enfatizzando la soggettività e la spontaneità (dalle prime esperienze di V. Kandinskij all’espressionismo astratto e all’informale).
Del tutto peculiare delle esperienze artistiche del 20° sec. (a partire dalle elaborazioni teoriche e pratiche di Kandinskij intorno al 1910), questa nuova forma espressiva affonda le sue radici nelle precedenti esperienze artistiche (V. van Gogh, espressionismo francese e tedesco, neoimpressionismo, cubismo) e nelle non meno stimolanti conquiste intellettuali e sociali della fine del 19° sec.: necessità di una più libera espressione di sé, progressi della scienza e della tecnologia, strutturazione e affinamento della disciplina storico-artistica e della riflessione estetica (fondamentali in questa prospettiva i contributi di K. Fieldler, A. Riegl, W. Worringer).
Parallelamente alla fortuna dell’espressione arte astratta, consolidatasi, in contrapposizione alla locuzione arte figurativa, a indicare positivamente una manifestazione della creatività artistica, si manifesta nello stesso ambito semantico l’uso di espressioni quali arte non oggettiva od arte non figurativa, giungendo, per contrapposizione polemica, all’espressione arte concreta, per affermare che ogni riproduzione o interpretazione della realtà è illusoria (quindi astratta), mentre la forma creata dall’artista indipendentemente dalla natura è la creazione di una nuova, concreta realtà.
Con un’accezione meno determinata si possono comprendere nell’astrattismo. le esperienze artistiche del 20° sec. che pur partendo dalla realtà naturale ne operano deliberatamente una semplificazione, schematizzazione o sofisticazione. | ©Treccani
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Megan Duncanson
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Wassily Kandinsky
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Wassily Kandinsky
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Wassily Kandinsky
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Wassily Kandinsky
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Leonid Afremov
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Abstract Digital Art