Introduction
In the art world, to find our way we needn’t probe every nook and cranny, but rather navigate the terrain by recognizing landmarks ‒ for us categories and prototypes.
If you are familiar with abstract art we hope to show you new artworks and a way of analysing them. If you have slight exposure to abstract art but have seen art you like, that is a reasonable starting point. We will show much and varied abstract art and supply explanations. Hopefully, you will come to enjoy what you see.
Art Requires Abstracting
Before we get into clearly abstract art, notice that all art requires abstracting in the sense that all art simplifies, intensifies, and makes choices. Those actions move the artwork away from realism toward abstraction. Let’s start with the most realistic visual art form, photography. A simple example is a photo where the shape and density of shadows, made bolder than what we see, take on a dramatic abstract quality. Similarly, absence of color in black and white photographs and movies produces a graphic, abstract quality that people like.
Is abstracting done in representational painting? Yes. From the start, the artist chooses what to exclude to simplify the composition for easier painting and to make the picture strong and unified. The artist freely takes liberties with contrast and colors, choosing warm colors, cool colors, and complementary colors, to make the picture attractive and interesting. All that choosing and distorting is a form of abstraction. Drawings and prints are even more abstract in a graceful way. The resulting artwork easily has more charm than the observed scene.
Example. See the woodcut by Otakar Kuban. How has the man's shape, his inside, and the background been abstracted and stylized?
In starting from nature, if some abstracting is good, is more abstracting better? It is a delicate issue depending on the artist, the artist’s intention, and the observer’s taste. It is easy to overdo.
Regardless of the degree of abstraction, you are still entitled to your taste. But you will have a more rewarding experience if you attempt to explain your taste to yourself. What about an artwork specifically do you like or don’t like and why? Throughout the book, when opportune, we will ask you questions to sharpen your observation and understanding of a specific work.
Example. See the author's flag painting. What happened to the stars and to the stripes?
It is worth pondering, tha it is difficult to find anything to change that would improve a masterpiece, while for a lesser work it is easy to find improvements. For the masterpiece though there are plenty of questions and lessons to learn about what makes it work so well. That is what we are after rather than just a worshipful attitude.
Example. See the black and white painting by Carmen Herrera. In this case, the artist is credited with formulating the idea. After that there is not a need for judgement and personality expression. 
The art we consider may start from the physical world or from geometry, imagination, or feelings. Meanings beyond the work itself may emerge but don’t have to. You may have heard the story of an artist who overhears viewers discussing her works and speculating about linkages, sources, relationships, and meanings that, the artist never considered. The artist wisely decides to just be quiet and let them speculate. Perhaps, they actually do see something the artist wasn’t aware of at the time. There is nothing wrong with that. The observer always has to contribute something to the experience.
Example. See the painting called Aztec iii, done by Jack Youngerman and hanging in the New York apartment of the artist Frank Stella. I think you can see this does not look all preplanned. There is more emotion, judgement, intuition, and on the spot execution expressed here.
What do you see as its attractive features? Is it red on white or white on red? Would the center of interest look better centered or better as is? Do you see any principles to its attractiveness?
Did Youngerman use a brush? How big? Too bad we don't have a video. Would that explain it?
The Plan
If we accept that all art is abstract to some extent, then we only need to decide how much and what kind of abstraction to examine.
Our method is simply put: we will look into the more abstract more and the less abstract less, but at times we will start with semi-abstraction to ease our way.
Naming
The names Modern, and Postmodern are used in art with a peculiar meaning which we will get at by first looking at the naming process.
Art periods and movements react to what came before them. By react, we mean artists adopt different views, attitudes, techniques and materials, than those predominant in the previous movement. For example, impressionism in mid to late 1800s reacted to stale academic art. Similarly, a few decades later, pointillism and fauvism, part of post impressionism reacted to impressionism. The turn of the twentieth century marks the nominal start of Modernism. Surprisingly, modern in art doesn’t mean up-to-the-present. Modern and modernism in art refer to positive, even idealistic, attitudes toward material progress and inventions brought to everyday life from about 1900 to 1960. We are so familiar, we take them for granted: the auto, truck, tram, ice box, refrigerator, supermarkets, airplane, air travel, radio, movies, telephone, phonograph, and television.
Modernism celebrated speed, strength, industrial might, excitement, and the social and sexual freedom of the big cities. With that stimulus, modern art wished to break away from representation including standard portraits, still life, and landscape, and even from impressionism and postimpressionism. An additional impetus to break away came from photography which could take over the representational side of art.
Through the early 1900s up to midcentury, modern art passed through the movements of cubism, futurism, dada, expressionism, Russian abstraction, primitivism, and abstract expressionism. Most of that art was made with traditional painting, sculpting, and printing tools.
When does Postmodern arrive? As a reaction to the traditional tools, attitudes, and practices of Modernism, nominally fading out in the 1960s, artists developed minimalism, geometrical abstraction, conceptual art, installation art, land art, feminist art, and provocative questionable art. Those movements and others ascendant after the decline of Modernism are collectively called Postmodernism.
Note that every movement can have the seeds of the next movement in it and remnants of earlier movements still lingering. Also, regardless of named movements, individuals can practice art in a contrarian style at any time.
Our last broad term is Contemporary Art which refers to art being produced now, or not long ago. The name is time based and applies whether the new art is reacting to something or not.
Perhaps in the future, art historians will look back and change the names we use to better names. In that regard, imagine if the name modern art had been applied to Renaissance art back in its time and if the next generation referred to Baroque art as postmodern art.
Naming has to work with what is understood. A hundred or more years from now new and better names for our period might be invented, helped by an ample amount of hindsight. That will still be difficult because the volume and diversity of artworks in the modern and postmodern time make it hard to single out an attitude or set of characteristics for a proper new name.