Who's your favorite abstract artist? Some of us, if we like early abstraction, might name a painter like Wassily Kandinsky, some a composer like Arnold Schoenberg, some a poet like Guillaume Apollinaire, and some, even, a photographer like Alfred Stieglitz. When we answer a question like this, we tend to consider each artist, and each artist's body of work, in isolation. But when we talk about artistic movements, especially one overarching and influential as abstraction, all names, all paintings, all compositions, all poems, all photographs — all works of any kind — are interconnected.
"Abstraction may be modernism's greatest innovation," says the web site of Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925, the MoMA exhibit for which the map was originally designed. "Today it is so central to our conception of artmaking that the time when an abstract artwork was unimaginable has become hard to imagine."
(c)MoMA
Just as abstract artists managed to make visible, audible, and legible concepts and feelings never before realized in art, the Museum of Modern Art's interactive social-network map of abstract art puts all those connections on display for us to see. (by Colin Marshall, March 2020)
Exhibition Info.
Dec 23, 2012–Apr 15, 2013
MoMA
In 1912, in several European cities, a handful of artists—Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Robert Delaunay—presented the first abstract pictures to the public. Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 celebrates the centennial of this bold new type of artwork, tracing the development of abstraction as it moved through a network of modern artists, from Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp to Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, sweeping across nations and across media. The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production, including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance, to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years. (by MoMA)
