Was Abstraction another progression in art, or was it entirely the achievement of Vassily Kandinsky?
While Kandinsky is sometimes credited with painting the first purely abstract painting, there were many other important early abstractionists including, Kasimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Frantisek Kupka, Natalia Goncharova, among others. But, more importantly, there is no one person or one moment that can take credit for the entire movement of Abstraction. It was a modernist movement, which, along with other movements in the arts at the time, grew out of or in reaction to earlier movements. In visual art, the move toward total abstraction can be seen in 19th century moments like Impressionism, Post-impressionism and Expressionism. The subject matter begins to become less important than the artist’s expression, and formal elements like color, form, and even the paint itself. Though, the sort of “this then that” way of looking at art history as a neat progression is simplistic too — there IS a kind of spontaneous mystery to the appearance of complete abstraction in the 20th century — it
