Between 1888 and 1950, the standard history of modern art describes a clean, formal march toward abstraction: painters slowly removed perspective, then accurate color, and finally recognizable shapes until the canvas was nothing but flat geometry. But the artists driving this progression did not think they were solving formal puzzles. They were trying to paint human terror, ecstasy, and doom, and they found that the physical world was getting in the way.
The shift began with the Post-Impressionism of the late nineteenth century. In September 1888, Vincent van Gogh finished painting the interior of a local bar in Arles. The result, The Night Café, is a 72.4 by 92.1-centimeter oil painting that ignores the actual local colors of the room entirely. Instead, he forced a sickly yellow light down from the ceiling lamps, warped the floorboards so they tilt dangerously toward the viewer, and boxed the few slumped patrons in with claustrophobic, blood-red walls. He did not care about the visual reality of the cafe; he cared about how it felt to be trapped inside it.
"I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green," he wrote to his brother Theo.
By the time Expressionism took hold in Germany two decades later, artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were no longer just bending reality; they were breaking it apart. In his 1913 painting Street, Berlin, Kirchner depicted the frantic, alienating pace of the modern city through jagged lines, acidic pinks, and tilted angles: the fashionable women on the pavement look like feathered birds of prey, the men exist only as sharp black coats in the background, and the street itself seems to slide violently down the canvas, leaving the viewer with nowhere to safely stand.
If Post-Impressionism bent the subject to reveal emotion, and Expressionism shattered it, Abstract Expressionism simply removed the subject entirely. The New York painters of the 1940s and 1950s abandoned recognizable imagery, leading critics to praise their "nonobjective" canvases as pure exercises in paint application. But the artists themselves violently rejected this label. Mark Rothko, whose 1950 painting No. 10 is a massive 229.6 by 145.1-centimeter expanse of hovering, luminous rectangles, denied that his work was merely formal.
"I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on," he told the writer Selden Rodman in 1957.
The friction here is that the movement that looks the most disconnected from human reality was actually the most obsessed with it. Jackson Pollock, whose drip paintings became the poster child for pure abstraction, despised the term Abstract Expressionism because it implied he had left the real world behind. "I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time," he insisted to an interviewer. "But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge."
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