The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (2 page)

(1852–1911).
American painter, etcher, and book illustrator, highly successful in England (where he settled in 1878) as well as his own country. He specialized in historical scenes and had several large and prestigious commissions, most notably a set of murals representing
The Quest of the Holy Grail
(completed 1902) in Boston Public Library (his friend
Sargent
also painted murals there) and the official painting commemorating Edward VII's coronation in 1902 (Buckingham Palace, London). Such paintings now seem rather overblown and ponderous, and he is most highly esteemed for his lively book illustrations. He was particularly prolific for
Harper's Weekly
, his association with the magazine lasting from 1870 until his death. Although he always remained an American citizen, Abbey was extremely fond of cricket and had a private ground at his house in Gloucestershire.

 
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(
c.
1760–1802).
English portrait painter. His clientele included many naval officers and he is best known for his portrayals of Lord Nelson , of whom he did several portraits with slight variations (1797–8). In 1798 Abbot became insane, and his unfinished works were completed by other hands.

 
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(1743–1809).
Danish
Neoclassical
painter. From 1772 to 1777 he studied in Rome, where his friendship with
Fuseli
helped to form his
eclectic
early style. On his return to Denmark his work became more purely classical, as is best seen in his cycles of paintings illustrating Apuleius and Terence (Statens Mus. for Kunst, Copenhagen). He became one of the leading figures in Danish art and had great influence as Director of the Copenhagen Academy (1789–91 and 1801–09), where his pupils included
Runge
and
Thorvaldsen
. Abildgaard occasionally worked as an architect, sculptor, and designer, and he also wrote on art. His most ambitious work, a huge decorative scheme at Christianborg Palace, was destroyed by fire in 1794.

 
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abstract art
.

Art that does not depict recognizable scenes or objects, but instead is made up of forms and colours that exist for their own expressive sake. Much decorative art can thus be described as abstract, but in normal usage the term refers to 20th-cent. painting and sculpture that abandon the traditional European conception of art as the imitation of nature. Herbert
Read
(
Art Now
, 1948) gave the following definition: ‘in practice we call “abstract” all works of art which, though they may start from the artist's awareness of an object in the external world, proceed to make a self-consistent and independent aesthetic unity in no sense relying on an objective equivalence.’ Abstract art in this sense was born and achieved its distinctive identity in the decade 1910–20 and is now regarded as the most characteristic form of 20th-cent. art. It has developed into many different movements and ‘isms’, but three basic tendencies are recognizable:

(i) the reduction of natural appearances to radically simplified forms, exemplified in the sculpture of
Brancusi
(one meaning of the verb ‘abstract’ is to summarize or concentrate);
(ii) the construction of works of art from non-representational basic forms (often simple geometric shapes), as in Ben
Nicholson's
reliefs;
(iii) spontaneous, ‘free’ expression, as in the
Action painting
of Jackson
Pollock
. Many exponents of such art dislike the word ‘abstract’, but the alternatives they prefer, although perhaps more precise, are usually cumbersome, notably non-figurative, non-representational, and
Non-Objective
.

The aesthetic premiss of abstract art—that formal qualities can be thought of as existing independently of subject-matter—existed long before the 20th century. In 1780, in his 10th
Discourse
to the students of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua
Reynolds
advised that ‘we are sure from experience that the beauty of form alone, without the assistance of any other quality, makes of itself a great work, and justly claims our esteem and admiration’; and in discussing the
Belvedere Torso
he referred to ‘the perfection of this science of abstract form’. In the 19th cent. several notable writers followed this line (Maurice
Denis
, for example) and many of the leading painters of the 1890s—notably the
Symbolists
—stressed the expressive properties of colour, line, and shape rather than their representative function. This process was taken further by the major avant-garde movements of the first decade of the 20th cent.—especially
Cubism
,
Expressionism
, and
Fauvism
. By 1910, then, the time was ripe for abstract art, and it developed more or less simultaneously in various countries.
Kandinsky
is often cited as the first person to paint an abstract picture, but no artist can in fact be singled out for the distinction. (A work by Kandinsky known as
‘First Abstract Watercolour’
(Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris) is signed and dated 1910, but some scholars believe that it is later and was inscribed by Kandinsky several years after its execution. This kind of problem arises not only with Kandinsky : several early abstract artists were keen to stress the primacy of their ideas and were not above backdating works.) Among the other artists who produced abstract paintings at about the same early date as Kandinsky were the American Arthur
Dove
and the Swiss Augusto Giacometti , cousin of Alberto
Giacometti
.
The individual pioneers were soon followed by abstract groups and movements—among the first were
Orphism
and
Synchromism
in France. There was a particularly rich crop in Russia, with
Constructivism
,
Rayonism
, and
Suprematism
all launched by 1915. The almost religious fervour with which some of the Russian artists pursued their ideals was matched by the members of the De
Stijl
group in Holland, founded in 1917. To such artists, abstraction was not simply a matter of style, but a question of finding a visual idiom capable of expressing their most deeply felt ideas. In the period between the two World Wars, the severely geometrical style of De Stijl and the technologically orientated Constructivism were the most influential currents in abstraction (they came together in the
Bauhaus
), although
Surrealism
also had a strong abstract element. The first international exhibition of abstract art was held in Paris in 1930 and there were many outstanding individual achievements in abstraction in this period—the sculpture of
Calder
and
Hepworth
, for example. However, in general figurative art was dominant, and abstract art was banned in totalitarian countries such as Germany and Russia. The second heroic period of abstract art came after the Second World War, when the enormous success of
Abstract Expressionism
in the USA and its European equivalent
Art Informel
made abstraction for a time virtually the dominant orthodoxy in Western art.

 
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