History of Abstract Art Timeline

At the beginning of the 20th century, Henri Matisse and young artists including Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, and Jean Metzinger revolutionized the Paris art world with wild, multicolored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that critics called Fauvism.

Image source: Fauvism

Cubism developed from Paul Cézanne's idea that nature could be reduced to the cube, sphere, and cone. Along with Fauvism, particularly through Pablo Picasso, it directly opened the door to abstraction in the early 20th century.

Image source: Cubism

Francis Picabia's Caoutchouc, made around 1909, was among the experimental works created in the search for a pure art between 1909 and 1913.

Image source: Francis Picabia

Wassily Kandinsky produced works including Improvisation 21A, the Impression series, and Picture with a Circle during the early 20th-century development of abstract painting. These works explored color, line, and form independently of visible objects.

Francis Picabia's The Spring, painted in 1912, formed part of his experimental pursuit of a pure art and reflected the period's movement away from conventional representation.

Dances at the Spring, painted by Francis Picabia in 1912, was one of several experimental works made during the early-20th-century search for pure art.

Francis Picabia created The Procession, Seville in 1912 as part of the experimental artistic developments that helped expand the possibilities of abstraction.

The second Knave of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow, held in January 1912, demonstrated the interconnectedness of contemporary culture. It included work from Munich, members of Die Brücke, and artists from Paris including Robert Delaunay, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso.

František Kupka created Orphist works including Discs of Newton (Study for Fugue in Two Colors) in 1912, advancing an abstract language based on color, rhythm, and circular form.

Robert Delaunay painted the Simultaneous Windows series from 1912 to 1913. Its fragmented planes and color relationships exemplified the move toward an increasingly nonrepresentational modernist art.

At the 1912 Salon de la Section d'Or, where František Kupka exhibited Amorpha, Fugue en deux couleurs, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire named the work of several artists, including Robert Delaunay, Orphism.

Image source: Orphism (religion)

Wassily Kandinsky painted Untitled (First Abstract Watercolor) in 1913. The work is identified as one of the key experiments in the period's search for a pure, nonrepresentational art.

Image source: Wassily Kandinsky

Léopold Survage created Colored Rhythm (Study for the film) in 1913. The work belonged to the experimental search for pure art and connected abstraction with ideas of movement and film.

Piet Mondrian painted Tableau No. 1 and Composition No. 11 in 1913. These works formed part of his transition toward a reduced abstract vocabulary.

Image source: Piet Mondrian

Through French Window at Collioure and View of Notre-Dame, both from 1914, and The Yellow Curtain from 1915, Henri Matisse came close to pure abstraction through expressive color and free, imaginative drawing.

Image source: Henri Matisse

Between 1915 and 1919, Piet Mondrian evolved an abstract language of horizontal and vertical lines with rectangles of color. Neo-Plasticism, developed with Theo van Doesburg and others in De Stijl, sought to reshape the environment of the future.

Image source: De Stijl

Kasimir Malevich completed Black Square in 1915. Identified as his first entirely abstract work, it became a defining statement of the Suprematist search for nonobjective art.

Image source: Black Square (painting)

Liubov Popova, a member of the Suprematist group, created the Architectonic Constructions and Spatial Force Constructions between 1916 and 1921, exploring geometric structures and spatial relationships.

Image source: Lyubov Popova

Piet Mondrian's Composition No. 10, made from 1939 to 1942, characterized his radical yet classical approach to the rectangle and abstract art. Primary colors, a white ground, and clearly defined black grid lines structure the painting.