cubism and abstraction

George Braque - Houses at L'Estaque (1908)

A next step in this intellectual concept of landscape came with the so-called cubists, who broke up objects and spaces into geometric shapes which they felt offered a visual parallel to the order of the physical world.

Wassily Kandinsky - Composition V (1911)

Both types of landscape, the expressionist and the cubist, led into complete abstraction—on the one hand that of Kandinsky, whose paintings transmit light and life through glowing, exploding color areas, and on the other that of Mondrian, who states that for him ultimate reality is expressed in the opposition of verticals and horizontals and in a carefully balanced asymmetry.

Piet Mondrian - Composition with Large Red

Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue (1921)

Vanishing-point perspective in the Renaissance was a way of creating the illusion of distance, and relating objects to each other in the space thus created. Space was mathematically calculated. But many a twentieth-century artist is more impressed with the mystery and terror of space.

Giorgio de Chirico - Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (1914)

Giorgio de Chirico tried to transmit something of this in paintings which at first glance seem precise and obvious, but as you look become ominous, disturbing. What is this world with its impossibly long arcade, its light that casts shadow but has no warmth? Is the child real? What of the unexplained shadow beyond the building? We find ourselves uncomfortable in an uncanny stillness.