In 1896, a thirty-year-old law professor named Wassily Kandinsky visited the French Impressionist exhibition in Moscow and stood before Claude Monet’s Haystacks, painted between 1890 and 1891. Kandinsky could not identify the haystack on the canvas without checking the catalog number, an experience that troubled his training in traditional representational art while revealing an unexpected truth: the color and brushwork held a presence entirely separate from the object itself.
When Wassily Kandinsky walked through the French Impressionist exhibition in Moscow in 1896 and found himself standing before one of Claude Monet's grainstack paintings (unable to recognize the subject without consulting the printed catalogue), he felt an initial shock of disorientation: a realization that the vivid optical harmony of yellow and violet pigment possessed an independent emotional force that owed nothing to the physical object sitting in a rural French field.
Abstract art did not drop into European studios as a sudden philosophical invention in the early twentieth century. It was brought into existence by three distinct movements that systematically dismantled the rules of depiction: Impressionism dissolved physical boundaries into light, Expressionism replaced objective observation with psychological interiority, and Cubism fractured three-dimensional perspective into geometric spatial planes.
Impressionism: Dissolving the Solid Object
The first crack in representational illusionism appeared when French Impressionists moved their easels outdoors in the late 1860s. By focusing on transient light rather than permanent form, painters like Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Auguste Renoir treated the canvas as a surface for optical sensations rather than a window into a physical room.
On April 25, 1874, French critic Louis Leroy reviewed the First Impressionist Exhibition in Le Charivari. Examining Monet’s 1872 seascape Impression, Sunrise, Leroy wrote mockingly that wallpaper in its embryonic state was more finished than Monet’s canvas. Leroy intended the remark as an insult, yet his critique accurately identified Impressionism’s core innovation: by subordinating subject matter to surface texture and chromatic energy, the movement rendered the physical object secondary to the paint itself.
Expressionism: Painting the Inner World
If Impressionism loosened the outer contours of objects, Expressionism discarded visual fidelity to depict emotional states. Originating in Germany in the early 1900s through groups such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, Expressionist painters used distorted proportions and intense, non-naturalistic pigments to convey angst, spiritual longing, and psychological tension.
In his 1911 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky articulated how color functions independently of representation. He wrote that color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, and the soul is the piano with many strings, where the artist acts as the hand touching keys to cause vibrations in the human spirit.
By treating line and hue as direct instruments of emotional resonance, Expressionists demonstrated that a painting could communicate without depicting a face, a room, or a landscape.
Cubism: Breaking Spatial Logic
While Expressionism pursued emotional subjective truth, Cubism undertook an analytical restructuring of space. Initiated in Paris around 1907 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubism abandoned the single fixed viewpoint that had governed Western painting since the Renaissance.
Picasso’s 1907 canvas Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, measuring 243.9 cm by 233.7 cm, shattered figure drawing into jagged geometric facets (MoMA purchased the painting in 1939 for $24,000 using funds from the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest). In his 1913 book The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, poet Guillaume Apollinaire termed this approach "Scientific Cubism," defining it as the art of constructing original structures from elements drawn not from visual sight, but from insight.
The Collision That Created Non-Objective Art
Despite their shared role in dismantling traditional art, the pioneers of these three movements held contradictory views. Picasso and Braque insisted that Cubism was grounded in physical reality, refusing to abandon recognizable subjects like guitars, pipes, and bottles. Meanwhile, Expressionists viewed Cubist geometry as mechanical and detached from emotional life.
It fell to a new generation of artists in the 1910s (including Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Kazimir Malevich in St. Petersburg, and Piet Mondrian in Paris) to synthesize these paths into non-objective painting.
"Nature or, that which I see, inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that…" (Piet Mondrian, 1914)
Mondrian restricted his visual language after 1920 to primary colors bounded by black grid lines, seeking universal structural equilibrium rather than personal emotional expression.
In March 1936, founding Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr Jr. organized the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at 11 West 53rd Street in New York, displaying nearly 400 works across four floors. On the catalogue cover, Barr printed a flowchart tracing two main currents into non-objective painting: a non-geometrical stream flowing from Gauguin through Fauvism and Expressionism, and a geometrical stream flowing from Cézanne through Cubism to De Stijl and Suprematism.
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