Namal 16
ABSTRACTION: Abstraction is characterized by the notion of cloaking the relationship between the observed world and a created image. To abstract means to "withdraw"; to "take away secretly"; to "draw off or apart"; to "disengage from"; to "separate in mental conception"; to "consider apart from the material embodiment, or from particular instances" (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, "abstract"). These meanings can be documented as far back as the sixteenth century. Taken individually or in combination, they were central to discussions about abstraction in the early years of the century. Descriptions of the process of abstraction have ranged throughout the twentieth century from secret removal to the creation of something visionary. The association of abstraction in art with meaninglessness is derived in large measure from Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, originally published in Munich in 1908. Worringer equated abstract with angular and antinaturalistic. Guillaume Apollinaire further divorced the abstract from reality when he devised the concepts of "pure painting" and "pure art": an art that would be to painting "what music is to poetry." In a 1913 or early 1914 sketchbook annotation Piet Mondrian elaborated: "One passes through a world of forms ascending from reality to abstraction. In this manner one approaches Spirit, or purity itself" (quoted in Robert P. Welsh and Joosten, Two Mondrian Sketchbooks 1912-1914 [Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1969]). Wassily Kandinsky similarly distinguished the abstract, a style of painting with few references to representational motifs, from the gegenstandlos, literally "without object or objectless." Art criticism from the 1940s through the early 1970s has encouraged the association of abstraction with nonrepresentation. Recent scholarship, however, has reasserted the subject in abstraction and has begun to rediscover meanings that were neglected by these
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Keywords: abstract, art, colors, composition, rust, structure, trangle
