Why Did Artists Start Painting Abstractly?

For centuries, one of the primary jobs of a painter was to make something recognizable.

A portrait should look like the person sitting for it. A landscape should resemble the countryside. A bowl of fruit should, at the very least, look like fruit.

Then, around the beginning of the 20th century, something remarkable happened.

Artists began taking the recognizable world apart.

Objects became flatter. Perspective became distorted. Colors stopped behaving naturally. A tree might become a collection of lines. A landscape might dissolve into patches of color. Eventually, some artists removed recognizable objects altogether.

Why?

It wasn't because artists suddenly forgot how to draw. Many of the pioneers of abstraction were highly trained artists who had spent years painting recognizable subjects.

They were looking for something else.

Painting Had Already Started to Change

Abstract art didn't appear overnight.

During the late 19th century, artists had already begun questioning how faithfully a painting needed to reproduce the visible world.

The Impressionists loosened their brushwork and became fascinated with changing light and color. Vincent van Gogh intensified color and distorted forms to communicate emotion. Paul Cézanne simplified landscapes and objects into increasingly geometric structures.

Then Cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque went further, breaking objects into fragments and showing multiple viewpoints within the same image.

Once artists began separating painting from literal representation, an intriguing question emerged:

How much of the subject could you remove before the painting no longer needed a subject at all?

For several artists working in different parts of Europe, the answer was: all of it.

Color Didn't Have to Describe Something

Think about what color does outside of painting.

A dark room can feel completely different from a brightly lit one. Certain color combinations feel energetic; others seem quiet. Music can create an emotional response without showing us a picture of anything.

Artists began wondering whether painting could work the same way.

Russian-born artist Vasily Kandinsky became one of abstraction's most influential pioneers. He believed color and form could communicate directly with the viewer rather than simply being used to describe objects. Music was particularly important to his thinking. If composers could create emotion through arrangements of sound, why couldn't painters create something similar through arrangements of color, line, and shape?

His paintings gradually moved away from recognizable landscapes and figures until color and form themselves became the subject.

The painting didn't have to be of something.

The painting could simply do something.

Artists Were Looking Beneath the Visible World

For some early abstract artists, the change wasn't merely stylistic. It was philosophical or spiritual.

Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, František Kupka, Kazimir Malevich, and others were interested in ideas about spirituality, universal order, and realities that might exist beyond what the eye could see.

Mondrian provides a wonderful example of how this transformation happened.

He didn't suddenly wake up one morning and start painting red, yellow, and blue rectangles. Earlier in his career, he painted landscapes, flowers, windmills, and especially trees.

Gradually, he simplified what he saw.

Branches became lines.

The spaces between branches became shapes.

Curves became increasingly vertical and horizontal.

Eventually, the tree disappeared — but the underlying structure remained.

Mondrian's Flowering Apple Tree (1912).

Abstraction allowed Mondrian to search for what he believed was a more fundamental visual order beneath individual objects. The tree is still there, but you have to look for it. The trunk and branches are being transformed into a network of lines and shapes, and the spaces between the branches have become nearly as important as the branches themselves.

There Wasn't Just One Inventor of Abstract Art

Art history once tended to tell a fairly simple story in which Kandinsky created the first abstract painting around 1910.

The real history is much more interesting.

At roughly the same time, artists including Kandinsky, Kupka, Robert Delaunay, Francis Picabia, Mondrian, and Malevich were independently pushing painting toward abstraction.

And Swedish artist Hilma af Klint had already begun creating extraordinary abstract paintings several years earlier. Beginning in 1906, she produced large works filled with spirals, geometric forms, symbols, botanical references, and brilliant color. Her work was deeply connected to her spiritual beliefs and remained largely outside the conventional art world during her lifetime.

Instead of one artist inventing abstraction, it is more accurate to imagine artists in different places arriving at a similar realization:

A painting didn't have to represent the visible world.

That idea opened an enormous door.

Hilma af Klint, Group I, Primordial Chaos, No. 16, 1906–07. Years before abstraction became a recognized movement, af Klint was using color, line, spirals, and symbolic forms to explore ideas that could not be represented through the visible world.

The World Around Artists Was Changing Too

The early 20th century was a period of extraordinary change.

Cities were growing. Machines were transforming work and transportation. Electricity, automobiles, airplanes, cinema, new scientific discoveries, and new forms of communication were changing how people experienced the world.

Artists were also exchanging ideas across painting, music, dance, poetry, architecture, photography, and design.

Traditional painting suddenly seemed inadequate to some artists trying to describe a world that felt faster, stranger, more fragmented, and increasingly modern.

Abstraction offered a visual language that had never existed in quite the same way before.

Abstract Doesn't Mean Random

This may be the biggest misconception about abstract art.

Removing recognizable objects doesn't remove artistic decisions.

In fact, it can make those decisions more important.

Without a face, tree, building, or bowl of fruit to organize a painting, the artist has to rely on the relationships among the visual elements themselves:

Where does your eye go first?

Does one shape feel heavier than another?

Does a line create movement?

What happens when two colors meet?

Where does the painting feel crowded?

Where does it breathe?

Does the composition feel balanced, tense, energetic, peaceful, or unstable?

Those aren't secondary concerns in an abstract painting.

They are the painting.

Abstraction Gave Artists Another Language

Abstract painting didn't replace representational art. Artists never stopped painting portraits, landscapes, still lifes, or figures.

Instead, abstraction expanded what painting could be.

An artist could paint what something looks like.

But an artist could also paint what something feels like.

Or reduce it to its essential shapes.

Or explore rhythm and movement.

Or investigate color.

Or create something that has no counterpart in the visible world at all.

More than a century after the first abstract painters began experimenting with these ideas, artists are still exploring the possibilities they opened.

And perhaps that's the most useful way to approach abstract art — whether you're looking at it or making it.

Instead of beginning with:

"What is it supposed to be?"

Try asking:

"What is it doing?"

Look at the color. Follow the lines. Notice the shapes. Pay attention to where your eye moves and how the painting makes you feel.

You may discover that the painting has been communicating with you all along.

Try It in Your Own Studio

You don't have to become an abstract painter to learn from abstraction.

Take a familiar subject — a tree, flower, landscape, building, or still life — and simplify it.

Paint it once.

Then paint it again using fewer details.

Then again.

Keep reducing the subject until you're left with the lines, shapes, colors, and relationships that seem most important to you.

At some point, you may discover exactly what those early abstract artists discovered:

Sometimes removing what something looks like helps you see something else entirely.

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