Painting

Piet Mondrian, a painter, was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art, primarily through the Dutch art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”).

Although he is best known for his abstract paintings made from squares and rectangles, Piet Mondrian started out painting realistic scenes. He especially liked painting trees. It shows how he began to develop his abstract style. The trunk and branches of the tree have become a network of horizontal and vertical lines.

While Mondrian was visiting the Netherlands in 1914, World War I began, forcing him to remain there for the duration of the conflict. During this period, he stayed at the Laren artists’ colony, where he met Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg, who were both undergoing their own personal journeys toward abstraction.

Mondrian used tape or strips of paper to paint the straight lines in the same way that we use masking tape. He also painted the lines free-hand. The areas of colour and white were then painted in, much thicker than the black paint.

4 Believing that true reality was hidden by the natural world, Mondrian sought to eliminate the “world of nature and man” In an attempt to simplify and perfect his images, he banished curved lines and organic shapes and used only straight lines and geometric shapes.

Mondrian even eliminated his use of referential titles, naming his De Stijl paintings compositions followed only by specific descriptions of their colors. In his early De Stijl works, Mondrian used fields of color in multiple hues, and used horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines.

Surrealists—inspired by Sigmund Freud’s theories of dreams and the unconscious—believed insanity was the breaking of the chains of logic, and they represented this idea in their art by creating imagery that was impossible in reality, juxtaposing unlikely forms onto unimaginable landscapes.

Marcel Duchamp made up the term ‘readymade’ to describe his sculptures made from manufactured objects. His infamous Fountain 1917, an upturned urinal, shocked the art world, raising questions about what art is and the role of the artist. (Find out more about Duchamp’s readymades).

Pablo Picasso is widely considered to have produced the first piece of art to incorporate found materials when, in 1912, he used the back of a chair as part of Still Life with Chair Caning. The piece was also considered one of the first collages of Synthetic Cubism.

The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called “retinal art”. By simply choosing the object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the found object became art.

Confirmed: The Oldest Known Art in the World Is Spray-Painted Graffiti. The first paintings ever made by human hands, new research suggests, were outlines of human hands. And they were created not in Spain or France, but in Indonesia.