askchaz asked: IF you had to name, and show examples, of 2 most important abstract artists or works based upon time period, methodology, message, or other, who/what would it be and why?
First, I think there are WAY too many important Abstractionists in Art History to narrow it down to just two. Abstraction is not an artistic movement, but rather the means to an end. Those ends are different throughout the course of history as they are different from artist to artist.
One artist may use abstraction as a way of breaking down visual complexity in attempt to get the the very core of “Art” itself. This was Piet Mondrian’s goal. “The de Stijl movement was grounded in the conviction that there are two kinds of beauty: a sensual or subjective one and a higher, rational, or objective - ‘universal’ - kind.” (Stokstad, “Art: a brief History,” 1999) Mondrian sought to simplify his art to find the second kind of beauty, the universal and objective that he believed was inherit in ALL art regardless of medium, method or movement. He limited himself to the use of primary colors (that is, the painting primaries: Red, Yellow, and Blue) and straight lines (which in turn created rectangular and square-shaped areas on his canvas). I think he was important because he saw abstraction as this means to an end. He pushed abstraction ever farther (though there have been those that went far beyond what Mondrian had done visually, but they mostly were postmodernists less concerned about the visual qualities of their work and more about what exactly those visual qualities meant. More on this in a bit). He truly tried to find what ties all art together and illustrate that precisely, accurately, but most importantly, DIRECTLY.
Of course, artists seem get distracted with other things or become interested in new things. The second artist I feel is worth noting specifically is, much to my dismay, Jackson Pollock. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like the man or his ideas nor is it a misunderstanding of what he attempted to with his work, I just would never buy a Pollock, even for $1. I don’t enjoy his work, but it is important. It was revolutionary, in fact. He used abstract as a means of illustrating something that can never be truly recorded and experienced by others, the act and movement of painting itself. He saw that when art is observed, it is only seen for it’s final product. What he wanted was to portray the motions he went through to obtain a brushstroke, the movement of his arm through the air as paint releases from the tip of his brush to fly through the air and end up on the canvas. This was always implied by other art, but never portrayed and largely ignored. It was ethereal, it didn’t really exist unless you happened to be in the studio of a painter or sculptor witnessing these movements firsthand. Pollock’s works brought forth these actions out of the ether and presented them, via abstraction, to an audience who had never really stopped to think about the processes and actions through which all art is born.
