Abstraction

Abstract

Abstraction in painting, drawing and other two-dimensional media is often popularly understood as involving an absence of depiction.1 On this view, an abstract painting is thought to be one that does not depict anything: its shapes, colours and marks do not, and are not meant to, occasion a visual experience of anything beyond themselves. This idea is wrong, or rather, not quite right. Of course, abstract paintings do not depict objects, the concrete particulars — people, landscapes, inanimate objects, and so on — that non-abstract pictures depict. But when we look at abstract paintings, we do not simply see the shapes, colours and marks that are actually there on the painting’s surface. We tend to see some marks, shapes and colours as in front of others — and this is regardless of whether they are painted one over the top of the other. Shapes can seem to be overlapping or transparent. They may appear illuminated or shadowed (not necessarily implying a consistent light source) in ways that in fact they are not. The kind of space abstract paintings depict is a correspondingly shallow, planimetric one, for the spatial relations implied above, articulated by features such as parallelism to the picture plane, overlapping and transparency alone, involve only a shallow sense of space. Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Black Relationship (1924, Museum of Modern Art, New York) (Figure 8.1) is an example in which all these relations seem to appear.