Founding fathers of Abstract Art

Kasimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian can be considered as pioneers and the first organizers of abstraction. Kandinsky, through his writings, proclaimed the futility of figurative representation. Malevich, with the simplification of his "squares," first explored the idea of raw color associated with a simple geometric form as the ultimate expression of the painter. Mondrian, through highly intellectualized work on the interplay of black lines and primary colors, reinvented the space of the canvas. Together, in three different countries but at the same time, while Braque and Picasso in France gave birth to Cubism (considered a form of abstraction), they sounded the death knell for figurative art as the sole and unique style, a reign that had persisted since the cave paintings of Lascaux.