Geometric abstraction

The book Contemporary Art: Splendor and Agony; of Ilda Rodriguez Prampolini, was written for students of Art History and Contemporary Art at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the Autonomous University of Mexico. With this text they would know the art history of the XX century. Starting, of course, to understand his development, with the Impressionists and the approach to historical problems, artistic, aesthetic and moral relevance.

When in 1916, the Dadaists launched his cry of defiance from the Cabaret Voltaire were probably not aware of the profound transformation that began in the artistic production of the western world

In this book, the author focuses on the history of Dadaism, as well as the different artistic movements that preceded and followed it. This work offers a critical appreciation of the evolution of art from the end of the XIX century (Impressionists and Expressionists) to the mid XX century (Surrealists and Abstractionists) in an exhaustive attempt to cover the “entire panorama of contemporary art”.

It is the Abstractionists that we will point out, since they relate to the content of this blog.

The line is a reference for understanding the drawing Manuel Pereira da Silva. You know it creates pure, simple, without flourishes, or waste analytical, full of substance, serious. Manuel Pereira da Silva has the power to simplify the synthesis features and shapes. Easily dominates the formal elements-building: stylistic symmetry, harmony, poetic, aesthetic balance, where the white paper is part of imaginary architecture.

The early modernist sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva emerged in the sculptural abstraction of the pioneers in Portugal, admittedly played from the late '40s, in Porto, by Arlindo Rocha, Fernando Fernandez and even a few years later by Aureliano Lima, after their removal to this city. These facts confer the production of abstract Manuel Pereira da Silva, held up with obvious stylistic analogy; in the same period and situation of those living with sculptors, unquestioned framework generation, must be credited.

In fact in the period immediately following World War II, in precisely that which started the career of Manuel Pereira da Silva, there were changes, important in the world of art controversies, including the two largest urban centers in Portugal: the quarrel " classical and modern, "added the debate between supporters of modernity - the neo-realists, surrealists and abstractionists - but was almost always in the studio that some modesty, very few, sculptors restless, rehearsed new avenues for his art, in productions sparsely that became public, and that, beyond a narrow elite, long ignored.


The Abstract Art

Geometric abstraction and constructive

The reconstruction of the world through painting has rarely been a problem so aware, confident and confessed to a series of artistic events that arose at the end of World War I.

No doubt the artists as they embark on the table abstraction, they were driven by a utopian need for spiritual life

Socrates had already stated these issues, the ideal of beauty through the representation of non-living beings, but of solid and plane figures created through the line, circle, etc..:

"Why should I maintain that these figures are not like other beautiful by comparison, but they are always beautiful in themselves and by their nature they seek certain pleasures that belong to them and have nothing in common with the pleasures produced by sensory stimuli."

It is through these signs of unchanging beauty that some artists try to rise above nature and themselves, to recover the art make it the expression in the service of higher ideals.

The 1930 and 1945 seem to be the triumph of geometric art with his Constructivist tendencies of abstract art trends lyrical and spontaneous. Numerous journals are created to disclose the geometric, continuous exposures at galleries welcome artists, exhibiting in legal proliferating, and the art of constructivism seems to oppose their closed forms or "concrete" composed in endless constellations to highbrow games subconscious screaming by the Surrealists absurd.

The Syndicate of Antique Dealers in Paris (1925), the exhibition also Circule et Carré in Paris, the publication of the single issue of Art Concrète performed by Van Doesburg, the group Abstraction-Creation and numerous magazines in various countries are evidence of the emergence of this new ideal language that comes with authentic validity. One of the pioneers of this art seeks to link up with the architecture is, without doubt, the wife and collaborator, the sculptor Jean Arp, painter Switzerland-Arp Sophie Trauner, whose simplified forms rigorous and fair voluntarily come to some niceties powerful proportions wisely experienced and highly intellectual.

In England, the emergence of The Circle, in 1937, organized by the sculptor Naum Gabo, the painter and architect Well Nicholson Leslie Martin marks the impact that the country, heir to the tradition of William Morris, had this constructive formalism, which addressed re-engage the work of art to life and enjoy the new language to speak universally. This crucial sense of communication through universal formulas (abstract and geometric) and not individuals is the impact of constructivist theory adopted by the same Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner in Russia 17 years earlier. The intention to establish an art of "pure" form goes beyond perfect aestheticism of "art for art" since the first case; it is the dynamic principle that moves the artist to "rebuild" the world and second to separate not at first, but the purpose of art that drowns itself.

We could hardly exhaust the review of all the artists that are somehow linked to the geometric art. One of the most extreme cases is the Felix de Marle, for whom art collective team and subordinate to architecture is the only position that justifies saving the artist, he shall be given by an art that must collaborate in the streets, cities, joy to live, not an elite, but all men.