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Art & Art History vocabulary · Movements & Periods

Abstract art

Meaning in art & art history, with examples

nounCore term

In art & art history, abstract art means: Art that does not try to show people, objects or places realistically and uses shapes, colours, lines and marks to create its effect instead.

In Turkish: soyut sanat, soyut resim

How it is used

Developed in the early twentieth century with artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. Writers separate purely abstract (non-objective) work from work that simplifies forms taken from nature. The opposite is figurative or representational art.

Example sentences

  1. Many visitors find abstract art difficult at first, so the guide asks them to describe only colours and shapes.

  2. Kandinsky's paintings from around 1910 are among the earliest examples of abstract art.

Common collocations

  • abstract painting
  • purely abstract
  • abstract forms
  • Abstract Expressionism
  • figurativeShowing people, animals or objects in a way you can recognise, even if they are simplified or distorted; the opposite of abstract.
  • modern artArt made roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, when artists broke with academic traditions and experimented with new styles, subjects and materials.
  • ExpressionismAn early-twentieth-century movement, strongest in Germany, in which artists distorted shapes and used intense colours to express emotions rather than show the world as it looks.
  • CubismAn art movement started around 1907 by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, which broke objects into geometric shapes and showed them from several viewpoints at once.

More terms: Movements & Periods

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