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Abstract Mixed Media

ABSTRACT STYLE

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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Style: Abstract
Period: 1940s
Abstract Non Objective Work on Paper Guggenheim Woman Artist Drawing 1940s w/c
Located in New York, NY
Abstract Non Objective Work on Paper Guggenheim Woman Artist 1940s Drawing w/c HILLA REBAY (1890 - 1967, GERMAN/AMERICAN) Abstract watercolor and graphite on paper 14 x 16 1/2 inche...
Category

1940s Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Abstract Non Objective Work on Paper Guggenheim Woman Artist Drawing 1940s w/c
Located in New York, NY
Abstract Non Objective Work on Paper Guggenheim Woman Artist 1940s Drawing w/c HILLA REBAY (1890 - 1967, GERMAN/AMERICAN) Abstract Watercolor on paper, c. 1945. 8x9 inches. Provenance: Estate of Hilla Rebay; Gary Snyder Fine Art, NY. In March of 1996, Snyder Fine Art opened its exhibition, Museum of Non-Objective Painting: American Abstract Art. Gary Snyder acquired a large body of works from the Hilla Rebay Estate, many of the works on paper spent decades archivaly stored in flat files with fresh colors and immaculate paper. BIO A woman credited largely for the existence of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Hilla Rebay also was an accomplished artist in modernist styles that included collage and biogmorphic-linear oil paintings. She is remembered primarily for being the key person in first exposing the American public to avant-garde art and creating revolutionary museum environments for that art. To remind the public that Rebay was an artist in her own right, curators at the Guggenheim Museum held a retrospective of her work in the spring and summer of 2005. Hilla Rebay (pronounced reh-bye) was born to minor nobility in Strasbourg, Alsace and had the full name of Baroness Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Rebay von Ehrenwiesen. Her father, a career army officer from Bavaria, and her mother encouraged her obvious childhood art talent. She studied locally and then enrolled in 1909 at the Academie Julian in Paris. There she was much influenced by avant-garde movements especially theosophist artists and writers led by Wassily Kandinsky "who helped formulate her lifelong belief in the power of intuition in art-making and other areas of life" (Glueck). In 1910, she spent time in Munich where she was further exposed to modern art, and she returned to Paris in 1913, having exhibited work in Cologne and Munich. In Paris she studied at the Academie Julian. By 1914, she was exhibiting with the Secession Group in Munich, the Salon des Independants in Paris, and the November Gruppe in Berlin--all rebelling against prevalent realism and traditional teaching methods. In Berlin, she associated with many modernist artists including Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Marc Chagall. In 1917, she med Rudolph Bauer...
Category

1940s Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

"Second Theme" 1949 Abstract Mid 20th Century Geometric Non-Objective Hard Edge
Located in New York, NY
"Second Theme" 1949 Abstract Mid 20th Century Geometric Non-Objective Hard Edge Burgoyne A. Diller (American, 1906-1965) "Second Theme" 1949. Pencil and crayon on paper. Signed and dated 'D. 49' (lower right). Image: 9 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York. Martha Jackson Gallery, New York. Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, New York. David K. Anderson Grandchildren's Trust. BURGOYNE DILLER (1906-1965) Recognized as the first American painter to embrace the tenets of Neo-Plasticism, Burgoyne Diller made an important contribution to the development of non-objective art in the United States. Working in a hard-edged geometric style, he produced paintings, drawings, and collages that paved the way for the development of American Minimalism during the 1960s and 70s. Born in New York City in 1906, Diller began painting and drawing as a teenager growing up in Battle Creek, Michigan. Later, while attending Michigan State University in East Lansing on an athletic scholarship, he made weekend visits to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he familiarized himself with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. He was especially drawn to the landscapes and still lives of Paul Cézanne, who modeled color to create structure and volume. In 1929, Diller moved to Manhattan and enrolled at the Art Students League, where his teachers included such progressive-minded painters as Jan Matulka, Hans Hofmann, and George Grosz. Hofmann's concept of the "push-pull" effect of form and color exerted a strong influence on his early work, as did his growing familiarity with Analytical and Synthetic Cubism, German Expressionism, and other vanguard European styles. Diller had the opportunity to see some of this work firsthand, but he also kept abreast of developments abroad by reading journals such as Cahiers d'Art. Diller completed his studies at the League in 1933, the year he had his first solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York. It was around this time that his paintings began to show the influence of the reductive, pared-down geometric compositions of the Dutch Constructivist Piet Mondrian and the equally restrained compositions of Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitsky...
Category

1940s Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Crayon, Pencil

Early Murano Glass Free Form Abstract Blown, Cut, Glass Sculpture in Bronze Vase
Located in Surfside, FL
This piece appears unsigned and unmarked. It came from an important estate in the Palm Beach area. It is an abstract flame or torch in a bronze vase. Venetian glass (Italian: vetro ...
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1940s Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Bronze

"Contrathemis I"
Located in Lambertville, NJ
Jim’s of Lambertville is proud to offer this artwork by: Dwinell Grant (1912 – 1991) Non-objective artist, Dwinell Grant, was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1912. His interest in the...
Category

1940s Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Paper, Mixed Media

"Dance, " Rudolf Von Huhn, abstract, mixed media, 1946
Located in Wiscasset, ME
Born in San Francisco, California in 1884, painter and printmaker Rudolf Von Huhn studied and earned a degree in engineering in Germany and didn’t devo...
Category

1940s Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

Mixed Media

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Located in Wilton Manors, FL
William King (1925-2015). Reclining figure, ca. 1965. Cast and welded bronze, 7 x 9.5 x 5 inches. Unsigned. William King, a sculptor in a variety of materials whose human figures traced social attitudes through the last half of the 20th century, often poking sly and poignant fun at human follies and foibles, died on March 4 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 90. His death was confirmed by Scott Chaskey, who is married to Mr. King's stepdaughter, Megan Chaskey. Mr. King worked in clay, wood, bronze, vinyl, burlap and aluminum. He worked both big and small, from busts and toylike figures to large public art pieces depicting familiar human poses -- a seated, cross-legged man reading; a Western couple (he in a cowboy hat, she in a long dress) holding hands; a tall man reaching down to tug along a recalcitrant little boy; a crowd of robotic-looking men walking in lock step. But for all its variation, what unified his work was a wry observer's arched eyebrow, the pointed humor and witty rue of a fatalist. His figurative sculptures, often with long, spidery legs and an outlandishly skewed ratio of torso to appendages, use gestures and posture to suggest attitude and illustrate his own amusement with the unwieldiness of human physical equipment. His subjects included tennis players and gymnasts, dancers and musicians, and he managed to show appreciation of their physical gifts and comic delight at their contortions and costumery. His suit-wearing businessmen often appeared haughty or pompous; his other men could seem timid or perplexed or awkward. Oddly, or perhaps tellingly, he tended to depict women more reverentially, though in his portrayals of couples the fragility and tender comedy inherent in couplehood settled equally on both partners. Mr. King's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, among other places, and he had dozens of solo gallery shows in New York and elsewhere. But the comic element of his work probably caused his reputation to suffer. Reviews of his exhibitions frequently began with the caveat that even though the work was funny, it was also serious, displaying superior technical skills, imaginative vision and the bolstering weight of a range of influences, from the ancient Etruscans to American folk art to 20th-century artists including Giacometti, Calder. and Elie Nadelman. The critic Hilton Kramer, one of Mr. King's most ardent advocates, wrote in a 1970 essay accompanying a New York gallery exhibit that he was, "among other things, an amusing artist, and nowadays this can, at times, be almost as much a liability as an asset." A "preoccupation with gesture is the focus of King's sculptural imagination," Mr. Kramer wrote. "Everything that one admires in his work - the virtuoso carving, the deft handling of a wide variety of materials, the shrewd observation and resourceful invention - all this is secondary to the concentration on gesture. The physical stance of the human animal as it negotiates the social arena, the unconscious gait that the body assumes in making its way in the social medium, the emotion traced by the course of a limb, a torso, a head, the features of a face, a coiffure or a costume - from a keen observation of these materials King has garnered a large stock of sculptural images notable for their wit, empathy, simplicity and psychological precision." William Dickey King...
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Mid-20th Century Abstract Mixed Media

Materials

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Abstract Mixed Media Torn Paper Collage Pop Expressionist Painting
Located in Surfside, FL
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Aspect Comique - Original Watercolour and china ink on paper by Wols - 1948
By Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze
Located in Roma, IT
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Abstract mixed media for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Abstract mixed media available for sale on 1stDibs. Works in this style were very popular during the 21st Century and Contemporary, but contemporary artists have continued to produce works inspired by this movement. If you’re looking to add mixed media created in this style to introduce contrast in an otherwise neutral space in your home, the works available on 1stDibs include elements of blue, purple, orange, red and other colors. Many Pop art paintings were created by popular artists on 1stDibs, including Francisco Nicolás, Melisa Taylor Metzger, Aimée Farnet Siegel, and Franco DeFrancesca. Frequently made by artists working with Paint, and Mixed Media and other materials, all of these pieces for sale are unique and have attracted attention over the years. Not every interior allows for large Abstract mixed media, so small editions measuring 1 inches across are also available. Prices for mixed media made by famous or emerging artists can differ depending on medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $1 and tops out at $385,000, while the average work sells for $2,221.

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