What Abstract Art Is — and Why the Object Had to Go

Abstract art is painting with the object taken away. Not forgotten, not botched, not unlearned — taken away deliberately, the way you take a crutch from someone who has finally learned to walk. This usually frightens people. You come up to the canvas, your eye searches for a tree, a face, an apple, finds none of them, and you conclude: «nothing is painted here.» You are exactly half right. Not a single thing is painted here. But that does not mean there is nothing here.

The meaning of abstraction lies in the absence of the object. What looks like emptiness is the statement.

Ask not «what is depicted» but — why was the depiction removed. Then it comes into view: the artist has stopped painting the world and begun painting his state directly, with no intermediary in the shape of a recognisable thing. It is the difference between a story about love and love itself. Figurative painting says: «here is the garden where I felt at peace.» Abstraction removes the garden and keeps the peace itself — colour, rhythm, warmth or cold. The direct speech of a state, without translation into the language of objects.

How the eye learned to let go of the thing

This is not a whim and not a collapse of taste — it is the end of a very long road. For thousands of years painting served the eye: the cave at Lascaux depicted the beast your life depended on; the icon painted the face before which one stands; the Renaissance discovered perspective and set man at the centre of the world; the seventeenth-century Dutch brought the sacred down into the room and painted, with tenderness, a jug of milk and the light on a copper basin. All that time the task was one and the same — to render the visible accurately. And then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the camera arrived and took that job for itself. A machine could copy reality faster and more honestly than any hand.

And this turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to painting. Freed from the duty to repeat, it went inward. The Impressionist cared not about the cathedral but about the light on the cathedral at seven in the morning and at noon. Cézanne began to look for the sphere and the cone beneath the apple — not the fruit but its geometric core. Cubism took the object apart into facets and showed it from every side at once, which the eye can never do in life. One step remained: to remove the object altogether. Abstraction is painting that dropped the object like a rocket stage. The stage was not useless — it carried everything into orbit and then fell away, because from there on its weight would only have been in the way.

Four people who took the world away

Wassily Kandinsky was the first to dare. Around 1910–1913 he began to paint canvases in which no single thing can be recognised — only patches, lines, collisions of colour. In «Concerning the Spiritual in Art» (1911) he says it outright: colour is the key, the eye is the hammer, and the soul is a piano with many strings. Paint, for him, does not describe an object; it touches the one who looks directly, as sound touches, bypassing words. For Kandinsky painting stood closer to music than to photography — no one asks a symphony what is depicted in it.

Kazimir Malevich went harder. In 1915, in Petrograd, at an exhibition with the cold name «0,10», he hung the «Black Square» — and hung it in the corner, the place where in a Russian house the icon had hung for centuries. This was not a provocation for its own sake. Suprematism, as he named his direction, meant the supremacy of pure feeling over the object. The square is not a picture of something black. It is the zero of forms, the point from which a new count begins. Malevich erased the world down to the ground to clear a place for pure sensation.

The artist removes the object not because he has nothing to say, but because the object stands in the way of saying the main thing.

Piet Mondrian moved more quietly and took longer. For years he painted trees — and across the series of his canvases you can watch a living tree gradually resolve into a lattice of lines, until what remains is a grid of black straights and rectangles of the three primary colours: red, blue, yellow. Behind the accidental surface of things he was searching for their steady order, the balance of vertical and horizontal. Not an image of the world but its skeleton, its geometric law. Form sets a frequency — and Mondrian tuned that frequency the way one tunes an instrument, clearing away everything inessential until it rang.

And in mid-twentieth-century America, Mark Rothko carried abstraction into an almost religious silence. His enormous canvases are two or three blurred rectangles of colour hovering one above another. None of Mondrian’s geometry, none of Kandinsky’s struggle — only colour that breathes. Rothko said he was painting not about paint but about basic human states: tragedy, ecstasy, doom. He wanted a person to stand close to the canvas and weep — not over a plot, since there is none, but over the state itself, which colour delivers directly, bypassing reason.

How to take this in without snobbery

Here the honest question usually arrives: «I could do that too — it’s just a square.» I’ll answer to the point. The question is not whether the form is hard to repeat — repeating it is easy. The point is that it was first set down by a man who had walked the whole road from the cave to that square and understood why the time had come to remove the object. The value is not in the difficulty of the brushstroke but in the precision of the decision. A screw is driven home not by force but by the fit of the bit to the slot; miss by a millimetre and all your force goes to waste. Malevich hit the slot of his time. That is the whole of it.

And one more thing, to let the air out of the solemnity. Abstraction does not demand that you «understand» anything — no more than music does, or the smell of the sea. Don’t ask yourself «what does this mean»; ask «what do I feel in front of it». If a canvas leaves you cold, that is an honest answer, not your failure: cold is simply the absence of warmth, and not every frequency will find an answer in you. But if, before Rothko’s field of blue or Kandinsky’s whirl, something inside you tightens, warms, goes quiet — then the artist’s state, across the decades and across the entire absence of the object, has reached you. Resonance has happened. And that is the only task a painting has.

Abstraction depicts nothing — it tunes. Don’t look at what is painted. Check what has happened to you.

That is the meaning of abstract art. Not to startle you with emptiness, not to cover a lack of skill. But — having removed everything inessential: the garden, the face, the apple — to leave on the canvas one pure state, precise enough to pass into you. The object is a frame. Abstraction took the frame down and handed you the thing the frame was always hanging there for.

The work on the cover — «Abstraction» →

— Evgeny Fleysher