In the same way that manned flight and other technological breakthroughs embody the intellectual achievement and adventurous outlook of the twentieth century, so too does abstraction.
With its decisive rejection of recognizable imagery in favor of felt experience, abstraction, unlike all other styles and movements, has transcended transitory and local interests, serving as a viable choice to international artists for the past eighty-five years. It is the defining style of the century as well as a sign of our place in history. Through its bold and visionary spirit, abstraction also evokes how art might proceed into the future.
Evolving after photography had proven its ability to capture appearances, abstract painting and sculpture convey what cannot be viewed through a lens. Abstractionists have challenged themselves to depict the unseeable rhythms of nature, the ineffable qualities of life, the heroic capacities of individuals and society, or the vast if vague regions of the soul. In this sense, these artistic revolutionaries have neither discarded the desire to communicate content to the viewer nor rejected the connection of their highly expressive art form to life. But the nonreferentiality of abstract art requires the viewer to plumb new emotional reservoirs in order to absorb and to be touched by it. Variously explosive, serene, intense, or contemplative, abstraction offers kinds of beauty unimaginable in earlier art. That this exhibition which progresses upward along the spiral ramp and into the Tower galleries is being presented by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is particularly appropriate given its history. Inaugurated as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, the institution exhibited the work of the great pioneers of abstraction in particular that of Vasily Kandinsky and played a major role in disseminating the new art style in the United States.
The Museum of Non-Objective PaintingTotal Risk, Freedom, Discpline
Abstraction in:
Photography