Degrees of Abstraction

Three pictures, three degrees of geometric abstraction. In the first, by Sonia Delaunay (Scene d’Interior), what might be a Cote d'Azur painting by Matisse is reduced to an arrangement of squares, circles, rectangles. Some simple patterns are achieved by repeating shapes like the triangles in the carpet, but the geometry is still very much at the expressive service of a recognizable tableau of two figures in a room.  

In the Frank Lloyd Wright window, the abstraction intensifies, though it still evokes a recognizable pattern from nature; the foliage of a tree or a sheaf of wheat. But you see the condensation. Half way between evoking natural forms and becoming a purely geometric ladder of chevrons, such pattern, clarified and reduced, is a central and eloquent means of abstraction. It recalls baroque music with its repeating variations on a theme that in turn would become a distinguishing trait of Minimalism, the repeating image, shape or note in clear, almost lapidary succession. 

In the Joseph Albers painting (Homage to the Square: Spring Tide), geometry prevails and all trace of other connotation disappears. Albers emphasizes the dynamic quality of succession that is so lyrical in Wright’s window, clarifiying it even beyond any sense of pattern into three diminishing squares that appear to come closer to the viewer as they get smaller.