Frank Stella: Pure Minimalism

Frank Stella - Hyena Stomp - 1962 - Alkyd paint on canvas - 77 x 77 in. - Tate Modern, London (click photo for larger image)American Minimalist painter Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, in 1936. He began to paint abstract pictures while at Phillips Academy, Andover. Stella studied history at Princeton University from 1954-58, and also took painting courses at the same time. Stella was influenced earlier on by such artists as Pollock, Kline and Johns. Moving to New York in 1958, he began creating works that reacted against Abstract Expressionism. He became a leading figure in the Minimalist movement, and later became known for his irregularly shaped works and large-scale multimedia reliefs.

Helen Frankenthaler: Abstract Lyricism

Frankenthaler - Coral Wedge (1972) - acrylic on canvas, 81 1/2 x 46 1/2 inches, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO. (click photo for larger image)American painter Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) created brilliantly colored, abstract paintings, widely known for their lyricism. Within those parameters her style was continually evolving, and she’s considered a major contributor to postwar painting.

Mondrian: Neo-Plasticim

Piet Mondrian - Composition No. III Blanc-Jaune - 1935-42 - Oil on canvas - 101 x 51 cm - Christie’s, New York (click photo for larger image)Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) founded named the movement Neo-Plasticism. It’s a rigid form of Abstraction, whose rules allow only for a canvas to be sectioned into rectangles by horizontal and vertical lines, and colored using a very limited palette. He published a manifesto entitled Neo-Plasticism in 1920. Another member of the movement, painter Theo van Doesberg (Dutch, 1883-1931) started a journal named De Stijl in 1917, which continued publication until 1928, spreading the theories of the group. The labels “De Stijl” and “Neo-Plasticism" came to be synonymous. 

Malevich: Pioneer of Abstraction

Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: White on White. 1918 - oil on canvas - 31 1/4 x 31 1/4" (79.4 x 79.4 cm) - MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) New YorkKasimir Malevich, (1878-1935) was a Ukranian painter and designer, and one of the most important pioneers of geometric abstract art.

Born near Kiev, Malevich trained at Kiev School of Art and Moscow Academy of Fine Arts. In 1913 he began creating abstract geometric patterns in a style he called Suprematism. He taught painting in Moscow and Leningrad from 1919-21, and published a book, The Nonobjective World, on his theory in 1926. Malevich was the first artist to exhibit abstract geometric paintings. He strove to produce pure, cerebral compositions, and his famous painting of 1918, White on White, carries suprematist theories to their absolute conclusion. Malevich described his aesthetic theory, known as Suprematism, as "the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts." Sadley, Soviet politics turned against modern art, and Malevich died in poverty and oblivion.

Kandinsky: A Delicious Early Work

Wassily Kandinsky - Cemetery & Vicarage in Kochel, 1909, oil on cardboard, Lenbachhaus, Munich (click photo for larger image)Russian artist Wasilly Kandinsky (1866-1944) is ranked among the artists whose work changed the history of art in the early years of the 20th century. He was among those who created wholly abstract painting, and he was a fouder of The Blue Rider group of German Expressionists. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic. Kandinsky truly was an innovator, although his later works do not possess the same charm and lusciousness as the earlier painting, featured here, which looks almost edible!