Colour, geometry, spirituality, movement and material do not constitute five closed boxes. A single work may bring them together. Geometry may vibrate; colour may organise space; material may produce an almost musical tension; emptiness may become active because a form interrupts it.
A study by Marie Dernoncourt — 2026
As the recognisable object recedes, relationship comes forward. But this advance does not follow a single route. At the dawn of modern abstraction, several paths opened almost simultaneously: some sought the vibration of colour, others the order of geometry, a spiritual reality, the energy of movement or the physical truth of materials.
A Multiple Invention
Between 1910 and the mid-1920s, abstraction moved through painting, but also sculpture, music, poetry, dance, photography and film. It was therefore not born as a uniform style recognisable through a few forms. Rather, it appeared as a shared question: how can a work be constructed when imitation of the visible is no longer its principal law?
The answers diverged. Kandinsky did not pursue exactly what Mondrian or Malevich sought. Kupka and the Delaunays did not treat colour as Tatlin treated wood, metal or glass. Yet these enquiries communicated. Artists met, exhibited, published, attended concerts, observed new machines and followed the scientific and social upheavals of their time. Abstraction became a field of forces.
Colour Becomes Energy
In figurative painting, colour could serve to describe an object, a light or a material. The first abstractions granted it a new autonomy. It no longer necessarily had to explain what it coloured: by itself, it could produce intensity, depth, contrast or rhythm.
In František Kupka’s work, the succession of forms and colours evokes continuous, almost musical transformations. Robert and Sonia Delaunay explored simultaneous contrasts: one colour alters our perception of the colour it touches. Circles, discs and coloured fragments give the impression of light in motion. Colour no longer merely fills a form; it becomes one of the driving forces of the composition.
Yet this path does not mean that every vivid colour is abstract. A spectacular palette may remain decorative. The real question concerns function: does colour construct a necessary relationship, or is it added merely to seduce?
Geometry Seeks an Order
Another path turned towards elementary forms: straight line, circle, square, rectangle, vertical and horizontal. This geometry was not merely a taste for rigour. It often carried the hope of discovering, beneath the changing appearance of things, a more stable structure.
Mondrian gradually moved from trees and landscapes towards an organisation of verticals, horizontals and coloured planes. He was not seeking to manufacture a cold pattern: he constructed a dynamic balance between opposing forces. Asymmetry, intervals and proportions keep the surface in tension.
In Russia, Malevich presented in 1915 geometric forms that seemed to float in a white space. His Suprematism did not describe objects: it aimed at an experience freed from their usual weight. The square, cross and circle became less symbols to decipher than presences placed within a field.
The Spiritual: Making the Invisible Perceptible
For several pioneers, abandoning representation did not mean abandoning meaning. On the contrary, abstraction was intended to reach what escaped the recognisable image: an inner necessity, a harmony, a transformation of consciousness or a reality deemed deeper than appearance.
Kandinsky developed this enquiry through colour, line and composition, in dialogue with music. Malevich pursued another form of the absolute. Mondrian connected his geometric order with the idea of universal harmony. Their conceptions were not identical, and some of their beliefs belonged fully to the intellectual context of their time. But they shared one point: a painting can act without narrating a scene.
This ambition calls for vigilance. Calling a work spiritual does not prove its depth. The word replaces neither construction, nor looking, nor the necessity of each relationship.
Movement Enters the Work
The beginning of the twentieth century was marked by acceleration: trains, cars, aviation, machines, cinema and urban circulation. Artists no longer wanted merely to represent a body or object at rest; they sought to make speed, repetition, displacement and duration perceptible.
Movement may appear in a diagonal, a sequence, a rotation or a rhythm of forms. It may also become real when the image unfolds through time: abstract film, non-narrative dance, light projection. The work no longer merely occupies space; it organises a temporal experience.
This path also transforms the viewer’s place. The gaze is no longer simply set before a stable image. It is guided, accelerated, diverted, halted and set in motion again. Seeing becomes a journey.
Material Refuses to Remain Silent
Abstraction is not solely a matter of painted forms. Cubism had already introduced papers, printed fragments and materials foreign to traditional painting into the work. With Tatlin, material acquired a new authority: wood, metal and glass no longer served to imitate something else. Their physical properties directly participated in the form.
His reliefs and counter-reliefs partly left the surface to enter real space. A material’s tension, weight, curvature, resistance and point of attachment became compositional elements. The work no longer represented a construction: it was constructed.
Here, a lasting fracture appears in the history of abstraction. On one side, the work may tend towards a pure form freed from the material world. On the other, it may acknowledge that every form possesses a body, a weight, a texture and a way of occupying space.
Separate Paths, a Shared Field
Couleur, géométrie, spirituel, mouvement et matière ne constituent pas cinq cases fermées. Une même œuvre peut les faire se rencontrer. Une géométrie peut vibrer ; une couleur peut organiser l’espace ; un matériau peut produire une tension presque musicale ; un vide peut devenir actif parce qu’une forme l’interrompt.
The essential legacy of the first abstractions therefore lies not in a repertoire of circles, squares or lines. It lies in the possibility of constructing relationships that possess their own necessity. Form is no longer merely the envelope of an object. It becomes an action: it weighs, directs, brings together, separates, suspends or creates passage.
What Begins to Appear
These first paths open a question that remains alive: what is left when a work ceases to tell a story yet refuses to become a merely decorative arrangement? The rightness of relationships remains. The way a presence transforms emptiness. The way a line places space under tension. The moment when material becomes a threshold.
Abstraction thus shifts from a language of forms towards an organisation of forces. This shift will lead us, in the next article, towards the great post-war transformations: gesture, material, surface, silence and the physical presence of the work.
To be continued — After the first inventions came a period of expansion and rupture. The next article will explore what gesture, material, emptiness and surface would do to abstraction throughout the twentieth century.
References and Sources
• Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) — Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: the international and interdisciplinary birth of abstraction.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Geometric Abstraction: Cubism, Mondrian, Malevich, Tatlin and Constructivism.
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — Resources devoted to Kandinsky: relationships between colour, form, music and spiritual enquiry.
• Tate — Historical resources on Cubism and the paths that emerged from it: Orphism, De Stijl, Suprematism and Constructivism.
© 2026 Marie Dernoncourt — touscreateurs.eu — All rights reserved.