| Abstract Art (Latin: abstractio - moving away, abstraction) - a direction of non-figurative art, which is far away from nearer to real image shapes in painting and sculpture. One of the aims of abstract art is to achieve "harmonization", the creation of certain color combinations and geometric shapes, to arouse a variety of ideas in the contemplator. The founders of abstract art were: Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian.
In 20th century art, the main representatives of abstract art were: Wassily Kandinsky (who worked in Germany, where he created the first abstract compositions), Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, who founded "Rayonism" (Luchizm) in 1910-1912 and founder of the famous "Black Square" Kazimir Malevich, considered himself to be founder of the new type of art "Supermatism".
Cubism, which tends to portray real objects in a set of intersecting planes, creating an image of some rectilinear shapes that replicate live nature, is related to the abstraction direction. One of the most striking examples of Cubism were the early works of Pablo Picasso.
Some trends in abstract art:
Non-figurative art;
Abstractness;
Cubism;
Rayonism;
Neo- Plasticism;
Orphism;
Supermatism;
Systematism;
Tachisme - the tendency to express spontaneity, the unconsciousness of creativity of spots or volumes in dynamics.
Abstract art (abstractionism, abstract art, non-figurative art) - a set of trends in the visual arts during the 1920s, that replaced the direct reproduction of full-scale reality with artistic plastic signs and symbols or with "pure" art forms of the scheme game. "Pure" abstraction should be taken conditionally, since even in the most abstract images, it is always possible to guess specific subject-figure motifs and prototypes - still life, landscape, architecture, etc.
The art of ornamentation always served as a permanent reservoir of such type of forms. The important historical anticipations of abstract art were also the enthusiasm of artists, manifested in early times, towards anamorphosis (or as it were "random" images), that were guessed in natural textures (e.g. in sections of minerals) as well as the principle "non finito" (externally unfinished, allowing to enjoy the game of lines and color regardless of subject forms), which developed in the Renaissance era. Predominantly the ornamental art of Islam and also Far East calligraphy, which freed the brush from the need of the constant imitation of external nature, all of them evolved in the Middle Ages into a non-figurative trend. In Europe, in the era of romanticism and symbolism, i.e. in the 1900s, artists sometimes, usually during the sketching stage but sometimes in completed paintings, exited into the world of non-figurative vision (these are separate fantasies of the late JMW Turner or sketches of G. Moreau); these were only a few exceptions but a crucial turning point took place only in the early 1910s.
"Great Spirituality" Art:
The first proper abstract paintings were created in the years 1910 - 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky and Czech painter F. Kupka, and already in 1912 the first of them justified his creative inventions in detail in program works "On the Spiritual in Art". Other landmark events occurred in the next 12 years: around 1913, Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova switched to abstract art from Futurism (Larionov named the new method "Rayonism"); at the same time, a similar transformation took place in the works of Italian J. Bally. Abstract "Orphism" was created by R. Delaunay in 1912 - 1913 and in 1915-1917 - a more pure, geometric variant of abstract art, created by Kasimir Malevich in Russia (Suprematism) and then P. Mondrian in the Netherlands (Neo-Plasticism). As a result, an experimental field was formed, where almost all avant-garde styles of those times, from Futurism to Dadism intersected.
Immediately three trends of abstract art were identified: 1) Geometric; 2) Sign (i.e. devotes major attention to symbols or icons) and 3) Organic, following the rhythm of nature (in Russia, a big supporter of such an abstract organic act was primarily P.N Filonov). Such a classification, however, concerns only to the external, formal features, since all variants of early abstract art were somehow symbolic and all somehow were inspired by the "cosmic rhythms" of nature. Orphism of R. Delaunay, based on pure colours, was a particular trend, which can be called "Chromatic" by conventionalists.
The internal content connection was hidden behind the formal differences. Under the strong influence of Theosophy and similar mystical tendencies (i.e. the influence of authors such as E.P Blavatsky and her followers, as well as P.D. Ouspensky in Russia and M. Shoenmekers in the Netherlands), Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich and Mondrian were convinced that their paintings, where the previous world graphically disappears into an outer space "nothing", represents an artistic apocalypse or in other words, provides the audience that threshold beyond which opens up a new "epoch of great spirituality" (Kandinsky) and takes place the "entry into the world of bloom" (Filonov). The onset of wars and revolutions during the same period only strengthened these romantic and idealistic beliefs.
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Abstract art uses a visual language of simplified forms, colors and lines. Simplification in abstract art
often knows no limits. One of the most famous abstract paintings is 
