Concept & History of Abstract art: Western & Indian Timeline –
Gaurav Kumar

I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects. -Piet Mondrian


Sometimes in the history of art it is possible to describe a period or a generation of artists as having been obsessed by a particular problem. In the western art world, the artists of the early fifteenth century for instance were moved by a passion for imitating nature. In the North, the Flemings mastered appearances by the meticulous observation of external detail. In Italy the Florentines employed a profounder science to discover the laws of perspective, of foreshortening, anatomy, movement, and relief. While in India, artist were working in Tasveer Khana of Mughal emperor Akbar, and Indian art reached almost a dead end towards the close of the nineteenth century. Indian creativity began to stir again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, Raja Ravi Varma, Artist of Bengal School, Calcutta group, and Progressive Artist Group were the life saviours of the Indian art.

In the early twentieth century, the dominant interest was almost exactly opposite. The pictorial conquest of the external visual world had been completed and refined many times and in different ways during the previous half millennium. The more adventurous and original artists had grown bored with painting facts. By a common and powerful impulse many of them were driven to abandon the imitation of natural appearances.

In this article the Concept & History of abstract art will be highlighted through the Western and Indian timeline.

Abstract art began in 1910 when the danger of war hung over the world. Militarism, political, and social tensions, boredom from hedonistic disillusionment with the promises of technology which dehumanized man, and put him at the mercy of his own inventions, insecurity, and loss of faith, a world of pragmatism and individualism led to the search for order and clarity in art. Men sought in art something unchanging and absolute, an escape from the depersonalization of industrialism, and liberation from the apparently arbitrary existence. They wanted to create a new, simple reality of order, and harmony to escape from the complexity, discords, and impending destruction.