Abstract Art is Good for You: Here’s Why
Have you ever seen a Jackson Pollock drip painting and thought that it looks like one of those school projects you proudly presented to your mum as a five-year-old, only for it to mysteriously disappear into a drawer for the next fifteen years? Or are you tired of tortured artists in roll-neck jumpers and horn-rimmed glasses telling you why abstract art ‘changed their life?’
Well, we suggest you dust off that childhood masterpiece and don’t dismiss the abstract aficionados just yet, because they’re onto something (even science says so).
The Beginning
Abstraction bloomed out of the nihilistic soils of 1920s America, where the Great Depression and the First World War plunged the country into a nationwide existential crisis. Fragmentation replaced unity, doubt replaced certainty and war replaced religion. Abstract artists such as Rothko, de Kooning and Pollock (and the frequently overlooked female artists, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner and Grace Hartigan) sought to unite culture in this era of disarray. They came of age in a period where large-scale cataclysm ruled, and where universal truth and moral law had been lost and replaced with disillusionment.
The Goal
These painters wanted to revive our imagination and shift our perspectives on the world. Through their languid brush-strokes they brought anonymisation, atomisation and modern civilisation to the fore, instead of merely representing the mimetic social ‘real.’ Modern life of the 1920s was dehumanising on a grand scale, and even contemporary life has left our weary sensibilities…
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