Large Impressive Abstract Oil on Canvas. Unsigned. 

Features a blend of various shapes and colors. Predominantly a pale yellow background. Shades rendered in greens, browns, reds, and blacks with soft edges, suggesting movement or blending. Framed.

Overall Size: 39 x 49 in. 

Sight Size: 38 1/4 x 48 1/4 in. 

Frame Thickness: 1 3/8 in. 

#3674 . 

Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th Century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. Even before that, most art, even when depicting mythical or legendary beings and events, adhered to a concept of dynamic realism, such as humanoid shapes in Neolithic cave paintings and the stylized angelic figures in illuminated manuscripts. By the end of the 19th Century, however, many artists felt a need to create a new style which would encompass the rapid and fundamental changes taking place in technology, science, and philosophy, which impacted the visual arts, music, performance, fashion design, and even politics in turn. Abstract art, non-figurative art, non-objective art, and non-representational art are all closely related terms with similar (though not identical) meanings. For convenience, the term “abstract” is now often used as a “catch-all” term to encompass the massive proliferation of these ideas, similar to the division between Catholic and Protestant religions, despite the abundant number of the latter and the minimal number of the former. Abstraction, most succinctly, indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete. Artwork which takes liberties in altering color or form in ways that are conspicuous can be said to be partially abstract, while total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. By the 1800s patronage from the church diminished and private patronage from the public became more capable of providing a livelihood for artists. Three art movements which were able to grow from this secular shift that contributed to the development of abstract art were Romanticism, Impressionism and Expressionism. Expressionist painters explored the bold use of paint surface, drawing distortions and exaggerations, and intense color. The Expressionists drastically changed the emphasis on subject matter in favor of the portrayal of psychological states of being. Neo-Impressionist artists like Edvard Munch were instrumental to the advent of abstraction in the 20th century. Paul Cézanne had begun as an Impressionist, but his aim to make a logical construction of reality based on a view from a single point became the basis of a new visual art that developed into Cubism. Mysticism and early modernist religious philosophy had a profound impact on pioneer geometric artists like Wassily Kandinsky. At the beginning of the 20th Century Henri Matisse and several other young artists revolutionized the Paris art world with “wild,” multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. The 1890s through the 1920s were an explosion of revolutionary experimentation and overlapping styles like Orphism and Pointillism, centered mainly around Paris, which had become the hub of the Western artistic world. In the 1930s Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali both expanded the concept of abstraction by exploring Cubism and Surrealism, respectively. World War II dispersed many of the (surviving) artists in France to all corners of the globe and particularly the United States, which led to abstraction as a world-wide movement influenced by individual tastes, regional environments, and national history that continues to evolve to this day.

Commensurate with age.