Abstract - The Founders

Kasimir Malevitch, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian can be considered as the precursors and the first organizers of abstraction.
Kandinsky, through his writings, expressed the futility of figurative representation. Malevitch, by simplifying his "squares," was the first to approach the idea of raw color associated with a simple geometric form as the ultimate expression of the painter. Mondrian, through a highly intellectualized exploration of black lines and primary colors, reinvented the space of the canvas.
Together, in three different countries but at the same time, and while Braque and Picasso in France gave birth to Cubism (then considered a form of abstraction), they signaled the end of figurative as the sole and unique style that had prevailed since the cave paintings of Lascaux.