Abstract Art

"Paintings and sculpture making no identifiable reference to the visible world.... They have become increasingly common in Western art since c. 1910, when a number of scattered experimenters influenced by symbolism and/or cubism began producing art with no recognizable 'subject' in the traditional sense....

"The first abstract films, by the dada artists Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, were shown in Germany in 1921. The first exhibition of abstract art in Paris, in 1930, led to the formation in 1931 of the Abstraction-Creation group, consisting mainly of non-French artists". --John Willett (in The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, 1977).

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