Abstract art.
Abstract art is a special way of painting. At its purest, it is simply form (shape) and tone (colour). There are no 'things' in the painting; the whole composition is about form and tone.
What is on the canvas refers to nothing outside the canvas.
Why would an artist want to do that?
We'll get there, but let's have a look at how abstract art arrived.
The opposite of abstract art is figurative art.
Two good examples of figurative art:
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The Hireling Shepherd
Holman Hunt
1851
Madame Moitessier
Ingres
1856
With their intense attention to detail, these two very different paintings might be described today as hyper- or photo-realism. Figurative painting tends to depict something in the world, imagined or real. It creates an illusion of reality.
In 1845, the British artist Turner exhibited a painting of a seascape at sunrise. It was unlike any seascape before it, and led to rumours that he was going mad. It was true that ill health would lead to his death in six years, but his art had been abandoning depiction for some time. There was ample evidence that Turner could produce compelling figurative art, but it seemed as though it had outgrown its usefulness for him. This isn't strictly abstract art - it still sets out to depict something in the world - but it is a step towards it.
Ten years after Turner's death, a young Paul Cezanne arrived in Paris to work with the artists who would come to be called Impressionists. On returning to his native Aix-en-Provence he was to write that he sought to "treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone". The most natural of objects could be reduced to their essential shapes and in that way, they would reveal their aesthetic truth. Again this isn't abstract art (although you will hear and read it referred to as 'Cezanne's more abstract work'), but it is moving in that direction. Why? Because the artist is moving away from depicting how things appear to be, towards painting pure form.
Bibemus Quarry
Cezanne
1900
Paul Cezanne was greatly admired by other artists who came to work with the ageing Impressionists, amongst them one young Spanish artist called Pablo Picasso.
"Cezanne is the father of us all" he was to write later (although the epithet is also attributed to Matisse).
Why this move away from figurative art?
Some have suggested that the advances in photography account for this to some degree. The first daguerreotypes were being produced by 1830 and offered a particular kind of realism.
If this is part of the reason, it is unlikely to be because photography presented artists with competition. It is far more likely that the photographic advances set artists free to explore methods and techniques specific to their medium.
1826 daguerreotype
You can see Cezanne's influence in the work which Picasso and Braques began to produce around 1910.
The Portuguese
Georges Braques
1911
However, they also produced work which abandoned figurative elements in favour of words, newspaper cuttings, fragments of objects and other 'signifiers.
To some extent, Picasso was playing with the idea that a painting communicates information.
Some of their work was - like Cezanne's - fragmented figurative painting. You can recognise subjects even though they are reduced to basic shapes.
Ma Jolie
Pablo Picasso
1912
We could look in a number of directions to find a 'next step'.
I've chosen the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.
This sequence is a little contrived, but it shows Mondrian's progression from figurative to abstract work.
Here is a tree which he painted in 1905
Here is one from 1908.
What has happened?
It seems to me that the artist has wanted to accentuate the forms which make up the image of the tree. We are given the impression of a gnarled and twisted tree because of the intensity of the angles. He has also exaggerated the colours so that we recognise them perhaps first as colours rather than the colours of a tree.
So how about this tree from 1912?
I would say that the artist has abandoned almost every reference to the motif of a tree. Instead he has given us the shapes and colours of a tree arranged on the canvas.
The following year, Mondrian produced this.
His notes tell us that he began by sketching a tree. Bearing in mind his early paintings we might say that he has removed everything from the image except shapes and colours.
Another way of saying this is that he has simplified the image of the tree to its basics. What we have here, we might say, is the essence of the tree.
Eventually, Mondrian would move towards saying, in effect:
"What we have here are forms and tones".
This Composition of 1917 prefigures his later work, beloved by L'Oreal marketing and others.