ABSTRACT PAINTING

"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colours, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential." -- Wassily Kandinsky

Abstrct Painting by DAALI

In its purest form in Western art, an abstract art is one without a recognisable subject, one which doesn't relate to anything external or try to "look like" something. Instead the colour and form (and often the materials and support) are the subject of the abstract painting. It's completely non-objective or non-representational.
A further distinction tends to be made between abstract art which is geometric, such as the work of Mondrian, and abstract art that is more fluid (and where the apparent spontaneity often belies careful planning and execution), such as the abstract art of Kandinsky or Pollock.

Also generally classified with abstract art are figurative abstractions and paintings which represent things that aren't visual, such an emotion, sound, or spiritual experience. Figurative abstractions are abstractions or simplifications of reality, where detail is eliminated from recognisable objects leaving only the essence or some degree of recognisable form.


In Western art history, the break from the notion that a painting had to represent something happened in the early 20th century. Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and other art movements of the time all contributed by breaking the "rules" of art followed since The Renaissance. Impressionism saw painters not "finishing" their paintings. The Fauvists used colour in a non-realistic way. Cubism introduced the idea of painting an object from more than one view point. From all of these the idea developed that colour, line, form, and texture could be the "subject" of the painting.

Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in the 1940s, applied the principles of Expressionism to abstract painting. The action painting of Jackson Pollock, in which paint was dripped, dropped, smeared, spattered, or thrown on the canvas, is a good example.

In 1864 the critic Ernest Chesneau wrote that if the trend the Impressionists were setting continued, paintings would eventually consist of nothing but "two broadly brushed areas of colour". What would he have thought of the art being produced 100 years later?

Christ of Saint John of the Cross(1951)

1951. Oil and canvas, 205 x 116 cm.

Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum

By far the most popular of all Dali’s religious works is without a doubt his Christ of Saint John of the Cross, whose figure dominates the Bay of Port Lligat. The painting was inspired by a drawing, preserved in the Convent of the Incarnation in Avila, Spain, and done by Saint John if the Cross himself after he had seen this vision of Christ during ecstasy. The people beside the boat are derived from a picture by Le Nain and from drawing by Velázquez for The Surrender of Breda.

At the bottom of his studies for the Christ, Dali wrote: "In the first place, in 1950, I had a ‘cosmic dream’ in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the ‘nucleus of the atom’. This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it ‘the very unity of the universe’, the Christ ! In the second place, when thanks to the instructions of Father Bruno, a Carmelite, I saw the Christ drawn by Saint John of the Cross, I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle, which ‘aesthetically’ summarized all my previous experiments, and I inscribed my Christ in this triangle." This wor was regarded as banal by an important art critic when it was first exhibited in London. Nevertheless, several years later, it was slashed by a fanatic while was hanging in the Glasgow Museum, proof of its astonishing effect on people.

 Dali relates that, when he was finishing the picture at the end of autumn in 1951, it was so cold in the house in Port Lligat that Gala abruptly decided to have central heating installed. He remembers the moments of terror through which he then lived, fearing for his canvas on which the paint was still wet, with all the dust stirred up by the workmen: "We tool it from the studio to the bedroom so that I could continue to paint, covered with white sheet which dare not touch the surface of the oil. I said that I didn’t believe I could do my Christ again if any accident were to befall it. It was true ceremonial anguish. In ten days the central heating was installed and I was able to finish the picture in order to take it to London, where it was shown for the first time at the Lefevre Gallery." When it was at the Biennial of Art in Madrid, along with other works of the painter, General Franco asked that two of the oils of the master of Figueras be brought to the palace of El Prado - Basket of Bread and Christ of Saint John of the Cross.