Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism

Abstraction is where a lot of otherwise confident lookers give up. Without a saint, a sitter or a harbour to hang the guess on, the picture seems to offer no purchase. In fact it offers plenty: size, edge quality, how the paint got onto the canvas, whether the shapes sit on a grid or float, and whether the composition has a centre. Those five things will place most abstract paintings within about fifteen years and usually name the movement.

The road to pure abstraction, 1910–1930

Abstraction did not arrive all at once, and it arrived by two different routes that still look different on the wall. Abstracted painting starts from something seen and boils it down until the source is barely legible; non-objective painting claims no source in the visible world at all. Tate’s own distinction is exactly this, and it is the first fork in the road when you are looking.

Kandinsky: abstraction that evaporates

Vasily Kandinsky’s route is the first kind. The canvases of 1910–14 — the Improvisations and Compositions made in Munich around the Blue Rider circle — still contain riders, mountains, boats and towers, dissolving as you watch. The tells are that nothing is ruled: edges are soft and organic, colour patches float with no horizon, black linear flourishes whip across the surface like handwriting, and the whole thing behaves like weather. Kandinsky argued that colour worked on the soul as music does, and his titles borrow musical terms to say so.

The trap is his later work. After he joined the Bauhaus in 1922 the wobble disappears and you get precise circles, arcs, chequerboards and floating triangles on flat grounds — Several Circles (1926) is the type. Same artist, two entirely different sets of tells, twelve years apart. This is the long career problem in miniature.

Mondrian and De Stijl: the grid

Piet Mondrian arrived at abstraction by dismantling trees and piers until only horizontals and verticals were left. From 1917 he and Theo van Doesburg ran the Dutch magazine and movement De Stijl, and Mondrian’s personal programme, Neo-Plasticism, set rules you can check off in seconds: horizontals and verticals only, no diagonal, no curve; the three primaries plus black, white and grey and nothing else; flat paint, no depth, no modelling. Black lines of different weights do the composing.

The rules matter because they date things. A diagonal in an otherwise Mondrian-like picture usually means Van Doesburg, who introduced tilted “counter-compositions” in 1924 and fell out with Mondrian over it. A green or a purple means it is not Mondrian at all.

Malevich and Suprematism: shapes adrift

Kazimir Malevich launched Suprematism in Petrograd in 1915 with flat geometric shapes on white grounds — the Black Square most notoriously. The distinguishing feature against Mondrian is anchorage. Mondrian’s rectangles are pinned into a grid that continues past the canvas edge; Malevich’s bars and quadrilaterals tilt and drift, with no baseline, in a white read as limitless space rather than as a wall. There is no shading, no brush performance, and often a slightly dusty, hand-mixed surface.

The Bauhaus: abstraction as design

The Bauhaus (Weimar 1919, Dessau 1925, closed under Nazi pressure in 1933) produced abstraction that looks designed. Flat colour, compass-and-ruler geometry, sans-serif lettering, and a neutral finish that would work equally on a poster, a rug or a chair, because the school’s argument was that all of them share one grammar. Josef Albers’s later Homage to the Square series — nested squares in carefully judged colours, painted with a palette knife straight from the tube — is the purest late expression of that teaching temperament: an experiment, not an outburst.

Post-war New York

After 1945 the centre of gravity moved to New York, and the scale changed. European abstraction was easel-sized, framed, and composed around a centre. Abstract Expressionism went mural-sized and unframed, so that the picture fills your field of vision instead of sitting across the room as an object. If an abstract canvas is taller than you are and has no frame, you are almost certainly after 1947 and almost certainly American.

The movement splits, following Irving Sandler’s 1970 account, into gesture painters and colour field painters.

Gestural, or action painting

Here the record of the body’s movement is the subject. Jackson Pollock’s poured canvases of 1947–50 — Number 1A, 1948, Autumn Rhythm — were made with the canvas on the floor and thinned household enamel flung and dripped from above, so there are no brush-hairs, no directional strokes and no fixed top edge; the skeins run off all four sides. Willem de Kooning is the opposite kind of gesture: loaded, wet-into-wet, scraped and reworked, and he never abandoned the figure, so a mouth or a knee surfaces out of the pink and ochre in the Woman series of 1950–53. Franz Kline reduced it to broad black bars on white that look like enlarged calligraphy but were built up slowly in both black and white paint. Lee Krasner’s all-over pictures sit in the same camp with a tighter, more rhythmic mark.

Colour field

Here the paint is a slow, enveloping presence rather than an event. Mark Rothko stacks two or three softly bounded rectangles on a vertical canvas, thinning his paint until the weave shows, so the boundaries bleed and seem to breathe. Barnett Newman does the reverse: a single expanse crossed by one narrow vertical he called the zip, its edges frequently hard and taped — Onement I (1948), the six-metre Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51). Clyfford Still’s fields are broken by jagged vertical rips, like torn bark, with a thick, trowelled surface.

Telling the two strands apart

The concept that ties them is all-over composition: incident spread evenly to the edges, with no hierarchy and no framed focal event, so the canvas reads as a continuous field that the stretcher happens to cut off. That habit is mid-century and American. European abstraction, even at its most radical, usually keeps a composed centre.

Two cautions. First, the boundary leaks — Pollock’s black pourings of 1951 are nearly monochrome, and Newman’s zips are as much a gesture as a field. Second, the next generation looks similar but is not the same thing: Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland stained raw unprimed canvas from the late 1950s, so the colour sinks into the cloth with no impasto at all, and by Noland the edges are hard targets and chevrons. Visible weave plus zero paint relief plus a sharp geometric motif means post-painterly abstraction of the 1960s, not Abstract Expressionism.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Measure it against yourself. Bigger than a person and unframed points to New York after 1947. Easel-sized and framed points to Europe before 1940.
2. Look for a centre. A composed focal arrangement is European; incident running evenly off all four edges is all-over and American.
3. Ask how the paint arrived. Poured and dripped means Pollock; dragged and scraped means de Kooning or Kline; soaked and thin means Rothko or the stainers; flat and even means a geometric abstractionist.
4. Check the edges. Ruled and black means Mondrian; hard and taped on a plain field means Newman; feathered and bleeding means Rothko; ragged means gestural.
5. See whether the shapes are anchored. Locked to a grid means De Stijl; tilted and floating on white means Suprematism.
6. Count the colours. Three primaries plus black, white and grey means Mondrian. A wider but flat, designed palette with circles and diagonals means Bauhaus.
7. Hunt for a residual figure. A mouth, an eye, a horse — abstraction with a ghost in it means early Kandinsky or de Kooning, not Malevich or Newman.
8. Feel the surface relief. Thick and physical means gestural; nothing at all, with the weave showing, means stained canvas of the late 1950s onwards.
9. Then date it, and check the artist’s other decade before committing, because Kandinsky in 1912 and Kandinsky in 1926 do not look like the same painter.