A study by Marie Dernoncourt — 2026
Abstract art did not appear on the day a painter suddenly decided to stop representing the world. It formed more slowly, like a crack in the obvious: what if seeing did not consist solely in recognising? What if a colour, a line, a rhythm or a space could act without having to become a tree, a face or a landscape?
Before the Word “Abstraction”
Long before modern abstraction, human beings produced signs, rhythms, interlacings, geometries, architectures and patterns that did not seek to imitate the visible faithfully. Islamic arts, textiles, ceramics, body painting, ritual objects and countless decorative or symbolic traditions bear witness to this. It would therefore be false to claim that humanity waited until the twentieth century to invent non-figurative forms.
What appeared in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century was more specific: abstraction became an explicitly claimed artistic project within modern painting and sculpture. The work no longer merely simplified a motif. It could now organise forms, colours and tensions without having to refer to a recognisable object.
When Representation Dominated
For centuries, within Western history, a large part of painting was tasked with making narratives, beliefs, people, events and territories visible. Mastery of perspective, anatomy, light and modelling made it possible to construct the illusion of a world behind the painting’s surface.
But this history is neither uniform nor universal. Even at the heart of figurative painting, line, colour, material and composition always possessed a force of their own. Abstraction would therefore not arise against all previous history: it would make autonomous elements that had already been acting silently within images.
The Nineteenth Century: The Visible Begins to Move
In the nineteenth century, several transformations converged. Cities expanded, machines accelerated the world, and travel changed the experience of time and space. New synthetic pigments offered painters brighter colours. Scientific research into light and perception also altered the way colour was understood.
Photography, made public from 1839 onwards, introduced a new instrument capable of recording the visible. Yet an overly simple formula must be avoided: photography did not, by itself, free painting from representation. It became an art in its own right, while painters continued to represent the world. But it profoundly shifted the question: what might painting seek that mechanical recording does not seek in the same way?
From the Perceived Object to the Experience of Seeing
The Impressionists did not abolish the subject. They shifted attention towards light, the moment, atmosphere and variations in perception. In their work, a cathedral, a river or a crowd also became fields of coloured vibrations. The painting began to show not only a thing, but the very act of seeing it.
After them, other artists pursued the rupture. Colour moved away from verisimilitude. Forms were simplified, fragmented or multiplied. With Cubism, an object could be presented from several viewpoints within a single construction. Single-point perspective was no longer the natural law of painting: it became one possibility among others.
Gradually, painting ceased to be merely a window open onto the world. It asserted its material reality: a surface, pigments, directions, intervals, densities and emptiness. What mattered was no longer only what was represented, but what occurred between the elements.
Abstraction Has No Single Inventor
Around 1910–1912, several artists in different parts of Europe crossed the threshold of the non-figurative image almost simultaneously. Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, followed by Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, took distinct paths. Some sought a spiritual necessity; others a universal order, coloured energy, a new conception of space or a language suited to modernity.
For a long time, history liked to designate a first painting and a first inventor. Historical research now leads to a fairer view: modern abstraction arose from a network of encounters, journals, concerts, manifestos, exhibitions and correspondence. It was a convergence, not a solitary flash.
What Were They Seeking to Make Visible?
The first abstract artists did not necessarily abandon reality. They challenged the idea that reality could be reduced to identifiable objects. They wanted to reach what does not always possess a face: a rhythm, a vibration, a balance, a force, a duration, an inner resonance or a structure.
Music offered them a decisive comparison. A sequence of sounds can move us, organise time and produce meaning without representing a chair or a mountain. Why could painting not also act directly through its own means? In Kandinsky’s work especially, this proximity between music and painting opened the possibility of a composition freed from imitation.
The Threshold
Abstraction therefore begins less with a disappearance than with a shift. The recognisable object recedes; relationship advances. Colour no longer necessarily clothes a thing: it becomes a force. Line no longer merely outlines a form: it directs, separates, connects or interrupts. Emptiness is no longer what remains after everything has been painted: it participates in the construction.
Here is the first threshold of our exploration: abstract art was not born from contempt for the visible world. It was born when representing the world was no longer enough to express what runs through it.
To be continued — Several artists would now open radically different paths: colour, geometry, spirituality, movement and material. The next article will explore these first directions of abstraction and the ways they continue to act upon our gaze.
References and Sources
• Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: abstraction as an international network of artists and practices.
• Tate — Abstract Art and A Brief History of Abstract Art: definition and historical perspective.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Daguerre and the Invention of Photography; Impressionism: Art and Modernity.
• MoMA — Kandinsky: Compositions: the evolution from figuration to abstraction and Kandinsky’s central role.
© 2026 Marie Dernoncourt — touscreateurs.eu — All rights reserved.