Summary

For avant-garde European and American artists at the turn of the 20th century, a nexus of developments encouraged the rejection of naturalism, which had driven most of Western art for more than four centuries. Despite the increasing secularization of Western society throughout the 19th century, religious beliefs and practices were one important source for artists’ experimentation with abstracting forms from nature. Christianity and other world religions aided artists who sought to shift the focus of their art from description to expression. Around 1910, certain European and American artists pressed forward to make art that they considered to be fully nonrepresentational. Still, the bridge between abstraction and nonrepresentation was a challenging one to cross and artists frequently invoked religious beliefs to justify leaving the natural world behind.

The evolution of abstraction in Western visual arts was intimately linked to the modern era. As important as religious concepts may have been to individual artists around 1900, artists had gradually moved to the periphery of society in the 19th century, leaving behind the institutions, including churches, that had been their primary means of support. These changing relationships gave individual artists the freedom to explore new ideas but eliminated stable sources of income previously available to them. On the other side of the patronage divide, mainstream religions were already threatened by the radical modernization of Western society, so even though religious dogma was replete with abstract concepts, churches were reluctant to embrace abstraction in the visual arts. At the same time, while artists were committed to expressions of spiritual truth in their abstract art, their objects were rarely produced with a conventional church setting in mind. Emerging in the 19th century, the complex relationship among modern society, abstract art, and religious practices persisted well into the 20th century.