Abstract art history shows that abstract art designs have existed in Western Culture in many contexts. Non-objective art is not an invention of the twentieth century. In the Jewish and Islamic religion the depiction of human beings was not allowed. Consequently the Islamic and Jewish cultures developed a high standard of decorative arts. Calligraphy is also a form of non-figurative art. However, Abstract art is distinct from pattern-making in design, since it draws on the distinction between decorative art and fine art, in which a painting is an object of thoughtful contemplation in its own right.

Constructivism (1915) and De Stijl (1917) were parallel movements which took abstraction into the three dimensions of sculpture and architecture. The Constructivists believed that the artist's work was a revolutionary activity, to express the aspirations of the people, using machine production and graphic and photographic means of communication.

Constructivism

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement in Russia from 1913 onward (especially present after the October Revolution), and a term often used in modern art today, which dismissed "pure" art in favour of art used as an instrument for social purposes, namely, the construction of the socialist system.

The movement was formed by Vladimir Tatlin, and later prominent constructivists included Joaquín Torres García, Manuel Rendón, Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo. The basis for the new movement was laid by People's Commissar of Education Anatoliy Vasilievich Lunacharsky with the suppression of the old Petrograd Academy of Fine Arts and the Moscow College of Painting in 1918. The focus for Constructivism in Moscow was VKhUTEMAS the school for art and design established in 1919. Gabo later stated that teaching at the school was focused more on political and ideological discussion than art-making.

Kazimir Malevich also worked in the constructivist style, though he is better known for his earlier suprematism and ran his own competing group in Vitebsk. The movement was an important influence on new graphic design techniques championed by El Lissitzky.

As a part of the early Soviet youth movement, the constructivists took an artistic outlook aimed to encompass cognitive, material activity, and the whole of spirituality of mankind. The artists tried to create art that would take the viewer out of the traditional setting and make them an active viewer of the artwork. Most of the designs were a fusion of art and political commitment, and reflected the revolutionary times.

The artists of the movement were influenced by, and used materials from, industrial design such as sheet metal and glass. Often these materials were used to create geometric objects.

De Stijl was a Dutch artistic movement, founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work created by a group of Dutch artists, from 1917 to 1931.[1][2] De Stijl is also the name of a journal which was published by the painter and critic Theo van Doesburg, propagating the group's theories. Next to Van Doesburg, the group's principal members were the painters Piet Mondrian and Bart van der Leck, and the architects Gerrit Rietveld and J.J.P. Oud. The artistic philosophy that formed a basis for the group's work is known as neoplasticism — the new plastic art (or Nieuwe Beelding in Dutch).

Proponents of De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white.

Abstract expressionism

Abstract expressionism was an American post-World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and also the one that put New York City at the center of the art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. The term "Abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the critic Robert Coates.

An important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of Max Ernst. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all over" look of Pollock's drip paintings.

The movement gets its name because it is seen as combining the emotional intensity and self-expression of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism.

Action painting

Action Painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied [1]. The resulting work emphasizes the physical act of painting itself. In theory, all young children are by nature very talented action painters, but the vast majority are forced to unlearn this art as part of their education

The style was widespread from the 1940s until the early 1960s, and is closely associated with abstract expressionism (some critics have used the terms "action painting" and "abstract expressionism" interchangeably). A comparison is often drawn between the American action painting and the French tachisme.

The term was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 [2] and signaled a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of New York School painters and critics. According to Rosenberg the canvas was "an arena in which to act". While abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had long been outspoken in their view of a painting as an arena within which to come to terms with the act of creation, earlier critics sympathetic to their cause, like Clement Greenberg, focused on their works' "objectness." To Greenberg, it was the physicality of the paintings' clotted and oil-caked surfaces that was the key to understanding them as documents of the artists' existential struggle.

Geometric abstract art

Geometric abstract art is a form of abstract art based on the use of simple geometric forms placed in non-illusionistic space and combined into non-objective compositions. Throughout 20th century art historical discourse, critics and artists working within the reductive or pure strains of abstraction have often suggested that geometric abstraction represents the height of a non-objective art practice, which necessarily stresses or calls attention to the root plasticity and two-dimensionality of painting as an artistic medium. Thus, it has been suggested that geometric abstraction might function as a solution to problems concerning the need for modernist painting to reject the illusionistic practices of the past while addressing the inherently two dimensional nature of the picture plane as well as the canvas functioning as its support. Wassily Kandinsky, one of the forerunners of pure non-objective painting, was among the first modern artists to explore this geometric approach in his abstract work. Other examples of pioneer abstractionists such as Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian have also embraced this approach towards abstract painting.

However, geometric abstract art cannot only be seen as an invention of 20th century avant-garde artists or movements. It is present among many cultures throughout history both as decorative motifs and as art pieces themselves. Islamic art, in its prohibition of depicting human or animal figures (to prevent believers from idolatry), is a prime example of this geometric pattern-based art.

Hard-edge painting

Hard-edge painting consists of rough, straight edges that are geometricaly consistent. It encompasses rich solid colors, neatness of surface, and arranged forms all over the canvas. The Hard-edge painting style is a subdivision of Post-painterly Abstraction, which in turn emerged from Color field. The term was coined by writer, curator and Los Angeles Times art critic Jules Langsner in 1959 to describe the work of painters from California, who, in their reaction to the more painterly or gestural forms of Abstract expressionism, adopted a knowingly impersonal paint application and delineated areas of color with particular sharpness and clarity. This approach to abstract painting became widespread in the 1960s, though California was its creative center.

Lyrical Abstraction

Lyrical Abstraction is an important American abstract art movement that emerged in New York City, Los Angeles, Washington DC and then Toronto and London during the 1960's - 1970's. Characterized by intuitive and loose paint handling, spontaneous expression, illusionist space, acrylic staining, process, occasional imagery, and other painterly and newer technological techniques. Lyrical Abstraction led the way away from minimalism in painting and toward a new freer expressionism.  Painters who directly reacted against the predominating Formalist, Minimalist, and Pop Art and Geometric Abstraction styles of the sixties, turned to new, experimental, loose, painterly, expressive, pictorial and abstract painting styles. Many of them had been Minimalists, working with various monochromatic, geometric styles, and whose paintings publicly evolved into new abstract painterly motifs. American Lyrical Abstraction is related in spirit to Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting and European Tachisme of the forties and fifties.

Cubism

Cubism was an early 20th century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles presenting no coherent sense of depth. The background and object (or figure) planes interpenetrate one another to create the ambiguous shallow space characteristic of cubism.