"What about the reality of the everyday world and the reality of painting? They are not the same realities. What is thiscreative thing that you have struggled to get and where did itcome from? What reference or value does it have, outside of thepainting itself?" Ad Reinhardt, in a group discussion at Studio35, in 1950. My essay starts with the origin and the birth of this greatexpression in the twentieth century. This movement not onlytouched painting, it had an affect on various aspects of art-poetry, architecture, theater, film, photography. Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian areconsidered to be the pioneer artists to have achieved a trulyabstract visual language in painting. Although they workedindependently, these artists were united by a belief thatabstract painting was capable of evoking a spiritual experience.A central figure of German Expressionism, Kandinsky, in 1911,began to paint densely layered composition of free-floating linesand areas of color, with the intention to reveal his desire toinstill visual form with the properties of music. By 1915,Malevich had invented a new, abstract visual set of paintingsconsisting of one or more colored geometric shapes on a whitefield. He visualized a state of feeling, and a sense of blissand wonder. Mondrian took a different approach with tightergeometric orientation and stricter compositional order. He wasalso inspired by landscape but he interpreted it as a series ofinterlocking vertical and horizontal lines. It would be hard to advance any definition of abstractexpressionism without taking into account the vast and variedcultural and historical happenings that led to its birth. Thisartistic movement evolved over a long time. As we look closelyat any of the members of the generation identified with abstractexpressionism, their biographies reveal the whole experience ofthis artistic adventure. It was an odd reaction of the newAmerica from the ...
