The History of Abstract Concepts in Art

The History of The History of Abstract Concepts in ArtAbstract Concepts in Art

How abstract ideas are personified and made visual by art

(Renaissance to present)

“There is only one great thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.”

–Georges Braque

“If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”

–Edward Hopper

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for.”

-Georgia O'Keeffe

“Great art picks up where nature ends.” – Marc Chagall

(Artquotes.net)

There has always existed a gap between the idea and the image. A concept can be conceived, presented, and perceived.

A concept that exists in nature and can be

physically located in time and space is a concrete concept. Because they are things that can be seen, touched, and physically experienced, they can easily be expressed and recognized in words or an image (Schumann).

Art tries to represent the world and provides some sort of historical record (Haskell 1). However, “images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent” (Berger 10). Abstract concepts are ideas not physically found in nature. They are intangible realities that art attempts to represent as often as it does the physical world itself (Sayre 43).

Throughout the history of art, artists have tried to visualize these abstract ideas and express them with a concrete medium—paint, marble, clay, or something else. They attempt subjectively to make intangible realities tangible through artwork. The concepts, however, are still abstract, and different viewers see and understand the images in different ways (Berger 11). Presented here are various masterpieces from the Renaissance to present that express abstract ideas. They are organized by concept, and are subject to the subjective scrutiny of the individual viewer.

What are some examples of concrete concepts? How about abstract

concepts?

Human emotion is probably the most commonly recognized and universal abstract idea. Love cannot be seen, heard, or physically touched, making it harder to express in concrete terms (Brown 44).

Artists have created art about different types of love throughout history.

Auguste Rodin, The Kiss, 1886, Marble, Musee

Rodin, Paris

Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss, 1907-8, Limestone, Muzeul de Arta, Craiova,

Romania

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-1908, oil on canvas, Austrian Gallery, Vienna

Titian, Venus and Adonis, c. 1560, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Widener Collection

Edvard Munch, Separation, 1896, oil on canvas, Munch-museet,

Oslo, Norway

Dieric Bouts, Virgin and Child, c. 1475, Oil on panel, The Fine Arts Museums of San

Francisco, Roscoe and Margaret Oaks Collection

Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child,

c. 1890, oil on canvas, Wichita Art Museum, Kansas, The

Roland P. Murdock Collection

Anguish, Horror

War and death can be experienced; however, the horror and anguish described by them are abstract emotional situations.

Artists have depicted throughout the ages visual images that attempt to explain anguish or horror.

Augustin Preault, Slaughter, c. 1834, bronze, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, France

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893, Tempera and casein on cardboard,

Munch-musee, Oslo, Norway

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading

Holofernes, oil on canvas, Museo e Gallerie Nazionali

di Capodimonte, Naples

Henri Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781. oil on canvas, The Detroit Institute of the Arts

Eugene Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1828, oil on canvas, Musee du Louvre, Paris

Vincent van Gogh, The Night Café, 1888, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Collection, New Haven, Conneticut

Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1820, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris

Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, 1820-

1822, fresco, transferred to canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

There are sublime occurrences that inspire awe. Awe is a human reaction that is does not exist physically in nature, but ironically is often evoked by nature.

There is much artwork spanning history that both describes awe and is awe-inspiring. Artists, along with movements such as Romanticism, describe sublime experiences in artwork—many employ the sublimity of nature.

John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851-53, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London, purchased 1945

Jacob van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, 1655-60, oil on canvas, The Detroit Institute of Arts

Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, The Wave, 1889, oil on canvas,

The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, Great Basin Desert, Utah,

1973-1976

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1809-1810, oil on canvas,

Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin

Socioeconomic Status, Class

Another abstract concept is a social one—that of status, how we relate to one another by wealth and lifestyle. Artists present this using indicators of someone’s class, such as clothes, possessions, or the environment they exist in. As with other abstract ideas, we can perceive them, but they cannot be physically located in nature.

Considered here are images created throughout the past several centuries dealing with status.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique-Ingres, Napoleon

Enthroned, 1806, Musee de l’Armee, Paris

Titian, Isabella d’Este, 1534-1536, oil on canvas, unsthistorisches Museum,

Vienna

Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, 1701, oil on canvas,

Louvre, Paris

Limbourg Brothers, October, from Les Tres

Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1413-1416, ink on

vellum, Musee Conde, Chantilly

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849, oil on canvas, formerly at Gemalde-galerie, Dresden (destroyed in 1945)

Honore Daumier, The Third-Class Carriage, ca. 1862, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edgar Degas, The Glass of Absinthe, 1876, oil on

canvas, Musee d’Orsay, Paris

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris: A Rainy Day, 1877, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Classical Antiquity, Ideal Civilization

Classical Greece (along with Rome) has served as the model civilization for most of western history. Our ideals of civility, reason, and logic stem from the Greeks. They were arguably the first champions of democracy, proportion, and the arts. Because of this, western artists across time have referenced the Classical Age (Aghion 5). Art has referenced the “ideal civilization” by reusing its narratives, mythological figures, and ideas of perfection, rationalism, and proportion. The concept of the “ideal civilization” is conceptual and intangible.

These references are dominant forces in the Renaissance, and Neoclassicism.

Antonio Canova, Pauline Borghese as Venus,1808, Marble, Galleria Borghese, Rome

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Apotheosis of Homer, 1827, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, c. 1482, tempera on canvas, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504, marble,

Galleria dell’ Accademia,

Florence

Angelica Kauffmann, Cornelia Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures, ca. 1785, oil on canvas, Virginia Museum of Fine Art,

Richmond, Virginia

Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784, oil on canvas, Musee du Louvre, Paris

Religion, Spirituality, God

Humans have long experienced spirituality and religion. This is a very universal abstract idea. Its various types and forms appear in historically significant artwork.

Many artists have dealt with the spiritual visually. There is a wide variety of ways this has been done. The frescoes of Roman Catholic Italy illustrate religious concepts in a way very different from that of the inner–spiritual wanderings of Wassily Kandinsky, for example.

Antonio Allegri da Correggio, Assumption of the Virgin, 1526-1530, dome fresco of Parma Cathedral, Parma, Italy

William Blake, Ancient of Days, frontispiece of

Europe: A Prophecy, 1794, metal relief etching, hand colored, The Whitworth Art

Gallery, University of Manchester

Paul Gauguin, The Vision After the Sermon, 1888, oil on canvas,

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Jan van Eyck, God, panel from the Ghent Altarpiece, c 1432, St.

Bavo’s, Ghent

Titian, Assumption and Consecration of the Virgin, c. 1516-1518, oil on wood, Santa Maria Gloriosa del

Frari, Venice

Gianlorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, 1645-1652,

marble, Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome

Giotto and his pupils, St Francis Renouncing His

Earthly Possessions, c.

1295-1330, fresco

Wassily Kandinsky, Black Lines, December 1913, oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Velocity, Speed

Another abstract concept presented in art may seem physical, but cannot be physically located in time and space: speed. Artists have touched on this idea in a great deal of art.

Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase,

No. 2, 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia

Museum of Art

Eadweard Muybridge, Annie G. Cantered, Saddled, 1887, collotype print, Philadelphia Museum of Art

J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed, 1844, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London

Jackson Pollock, No. 29, 1950, oil, expanded steel, glass and pebbles on glass, private collection

Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, oil on canvas, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Giacomo Balla, Street Lamp, 1909, oil on canvas, Museum

of Modern Art, New York

Abstract concepts are abundant in art. They are conceptualized, presented, and perceived subjectively by human eyes in artwork. Abstract ideas exist in art—this is true for artwork dating from the Renaissance to present.

Bibliography

Artquotes.net: Art Quotes and Famous Artists. <http://www.artquotes.net> April 1 2007.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972.

Brown, J. Carter. Rings: Five Passions in World Art. Edited by Michael E. Shapiro. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996.

Haskell, Francis. History and Its Images. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Aghion, Irene, Claire Barbillon, and Francois Lissarrague. God and Heroes of Classical Antiquity. Paris: Flammarion, 1996.

Sayre, Henry M. A World of Art. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2000.

Schuman, Bruce. “Universal Hierarchy of Abstraction”. Origin Research. http://originresearch.com/sd/sd1.cfm March 17 2007.

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