Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Abstract art simplifies. A man becomes a stick figure. A squiggle is a wave. A streak
of red expresses anger. Arches make you want a cheeseburger. These are univer-
sal symbols that everyone from a caveman to a banker understands. Abstract artists
capture the essence of reality in a few lines and colors, boldly capturing objects and
ideas that even a camera can't—emotions, abstract concepts, musical rhythms, and
spiritual states of mind.
With abstract art, you don't look “through” the canvas to see the visual world,
but “at” it to read the symbolism of lines, shapes, and colors. Most 20th-century
paintings are a mix of the real world (representation) and colorful patterns (abstrac-
tion).
The artist scatters seemingly unrelated things on the canvas, leaving us to trace the
connections in a kind of connect-the-dots without numbers.
Further complicating the modern world was Freud's discovery of the “unconscious”
mind, which thinks dirty thoughts while we sleep. Surrealists let the id speak. The canvas
is an uncensored, stream-of-consciousness “landscape” of these deep urges, revealed in
the bizarre images of dreams. Salvador Dalí, the most famous Surrealist, combined an ex-
traordinarily realistic technique with an extraordinarily twisted mind. He painted “unreal”
scenes with photographic realism, making us believe they could really happen. Dalí's im-
ages—crucifixes, political and religious figures, and naked bodies—pack an emotional
punch.
As capitalism failed around the world, governments propped up their economies with
vast building projects. The architecture style was modern, stripped-down (i.e., cheap), and
functional. Propagandist campaigns championed noble workers in the heroic Social Real-
ist style.
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)
Like blueprints for modernism, Mondrian's T-square style boils painting down to its basic
building blocks: a white canvas, black lines, and the three primary colors—red, yellow,
and blue—arranged in orderly patterns. (When you come right down to it, that's all paint-
ing ever has been. A schematic drawing of, say, the
Mona Lisa
shows that it's less about a
woman than about the triangles and rectangles she's composed of.)
