Isamu Noguchi A Sculptors World Book

David Hare, a surrealist and Abstract Expressionist sculptor and photographer, was born in New York City on March 10, 1917. From 1936–37, he studied biology and chemistry at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Hare had no formal training in art but began experimenting. He took up photography in the 1930s and by the end of the decade was working in color. The Walker Galleries in New York exhibited his photographs in 1939. From 1941–44, Hare founded and edited the surrealist magazine VVV with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Peggy Guggenheim presented solo shows of Hare's work in her The Art of This Century Gallery from 1944–47. In 1948, he was a founding member, together with William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko, of The Subjects of the Artist school in New York and Hare, became friendly with Jean-Paul Sarte. Hare died on December 21, 1992, in Jackson.

Beginning in the early 20th century, abstract art became a leading style of modernism. Rather than portray the world in a way that represented reality, as had been the dominating style of Western art in the previous centuries, abstract paintings, prints and sculptures are marked by a shift to geometric forms, gestural shapes and experimentation with color to express ideas, subject matter and scenes.

Although abstract art flourished in the early 1900s, propelled by movements like Fauvism and Cubism, it was rooted in the 19th century. In the 1840s, J.M.W. Turner emphasized light and motion for atmospheric paintings in which concrete details were blurred, and Paul Cézanne challenged traditional expectations of perspective in the 1890s.

Some of the earliest abstract artists — Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint — expanded on these breakthroughs while using vivid colors and forms to channel spiritual concepts. Painter Piet Mondrian, a Dutch pioneer of the art movement, explored geometric abstraction partly owing to his belief in Theosophy, which is grounded in a search for higher spiritual truths and embraces philosophers of the Renaissance period and medieval mystics. Black Square, a daringly simple 1913 work by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, was a watershed statement on creating art that was free “from the dead weight of the real world,” as he later wrote.

Surrealism in the 1920s, led by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim and others, saw painters creating abstract pieces in order to connect to the subconscious. When Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York during the mid-20th century, it similarly centered on the process of creation, in which Helen Frankenthaler’s expressive “soak-stain” technique, Jackson Pollock’s drips of paint, and Mark Rothko’s planes of color were a radical new type of abstraction.

Conceptual art, Pop art, Hard-Edge painting and many other movements offered fresh approaches to abstraction that continued into the 21st century, with major contemporary artists now exploring it, including Anish Kapoor, Mark Bradford, El Anatsui and Julie Mehretu.

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