Abstract art asks something unusual of a viewer. There is no subject to identify, no story to follow, no likeness to check against the world. What is left is colour, line, shape, texture, scale and the relationships between them, offered as ends in themselves rather than as the means to describe something else.
That can feel like a lot to be left with, particularly on a first encounter. It becomes considerably easier once you know what the major styles are, what the artist was physically doing to the surface, and what questions are worth asking of a painting that refuses to answer the obvious one. This guide covers all three, and closes with how abstraction developed in the American Southwest, which is a more interesting story than it is usually given credit for. Our own holdings are in the Windsor Betts abstract collection.
Abstract art is work that does not set out to represent the visible world in a recognisable way. Within that definition there is an important distinction worth holding on to.
Some abstract paintings are abstracted from something. The artist begins with a landscape, a figure, a building, and progressively strips away detail until what remains is a structure of shapes and colours that carries the feeling of the original without describing it. Others are non-objective from the start, built from relationships the artist invents rather than observes. Both are abstract art. They are arrived at from opposite directions, and knowing which one you are looking at usually explains a good deal about the picture.
The meaning of an abstract work, then, is rarely a hidden message to be decoded. It is closer to the meaning of a piece of music: produced by structure, rhythm, intensity and pacing, and felt before it is explained.
A handful of abstract art styles account for most of what a collector will encounter, and the vocabulary is worth having.
Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, prizes the visible record of the artist's physical act. Gesture, speed and pressure are all legible in the finished surface. Colour Field painting, developing alongside it, replaced gesture with large areas of saturated colour intended to be experienced as an enveloping whole. Hard-edge painting went the other way again, using precise boundaries and flat planes with no visible brushwork at all. Geometric abstraction organises the picture through measured shape and structure. Lyrical abstraction is looser and more improvisatory. Minimalism reduces the vocabulary to very few elements handled with great exactness.
Most artists move between these positions rather than sitting permanently in one. The categories are useful for orientation, not for filing.
Across all these styles a few characteristics of abstract art hold reasonably constant. The picture plane tends to be asserted rather than disguised, so the surface reads as a surface rather than as a window. Composition carries the argument, since there is no narrative to carry it. Scale is active rather than incidental. And the physical handling of the material is left legible, because in the absence of a subject the evidence of making becomes the subject.
Because abstract painting removes subject matter, the handling of the material carries more of the weight. Learning to see technique is most of learning to see abstraction.
Look first at the paint layer. Is it thin and stained into the weave, or built up thickly enough to cast its own shadow? Are the edges of shapes taped and exact, or brushed and slightly uncertain? Can you see the order in which things were laid down, and did the artist leave earlier layers visible as evidence, or bury them? Mixed media work adds another set of questions: what has been collaged, embedded or scraped back, and does the physical incident sit on the surface or become part of its structure?
A specific example is instructive. Harold Joe Waldrum, who came to New Mexico in 1971 and spent nine years on a series based on windows in adobe walls before turning to the region's churches and moradas, arrived at his layered method by accident. He bought acrylic paint in New York that lacked the aluminium filler most acrylics contain, found it far thinner than he expected, and rather than abandon it he built the picture up in repeated coats. The luminous depth of his colour is a direct consequence of a purchasing mistake. He later said that his best methods had always come out of the accommodations he made with problems.
Southwest abstraction is usually treated as a late echo of New York. It is not. The Transcendental Painting Group was formed in 1938 by Emil Bisttram and Raymond Jonson, working out of Taos and Santa Fe, and committed to a non-representational painting concerned with spiritual and structural order. That is a founding moment for abstraction in the region that predates the New York School.
Janet Lippincott (1918–2007) connects the two eras directly. She had studied at the Art Students League as a teenager, served with the Women's Army Corps during the war, and used her GI Bill entitlement to study under Bisttram at his Taos school in 1949. She settled in New Mexico and spent the rest of her career there, among the first artists to make lithographs at the Tamarind Institute and later working in bronze at the Shidoni foundry. Her own account of arriving in a Santa Fe where nobody was painting modern pictures, and shaking everybody up with what she cheerfully called her screwball ideas, is one of the better first-hand descriptions of what it was to be an abstract painter in the postwar Southwest. She received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2002 and left her estate to St. John's College in Santa Fe.
The regional character of this work is real but easy to overstate. It is not that the landscape is being painted in disguise. It is that a particular quality of light, a particular architecture of mass and shadow, and a particular set of neighbouring visual traditions gave artists here a different set of problems to solve. Dick Jemison (1942–2024), who lived and worked in Santa Fe for twenty years before returning to Alabama, described the moment he decided to become an artist as seeing a Sam Francis painting at the Museum of Modern Art at eighteen. His Ancestor sculptures, tall attenuated wooden columns, and his layered mixed-media canvases come out of that lineage and out of the Southwest in roughly equal measure.
If you want to build an eye quickly, look comparatively. Set a hard-edge work next to a gestural one and note how differently they use the same amount of wall. Compare a large canvas to a small one by the same artist and watch what survives the change of scale. Look at how a sculptural work such as Paul Shapiro's heavily worked oils on linen handles surface compared to a print or a work on paper, where the medium imposes its own restraint.
Then look at what abstraction does when it is carrying cultural content as well as formal invention. That is a distinct tradition in this region with its own history, and we have covered it separately in our guide to Native American and Southwest abstract art.
Two practical points matter more than any others when buying abstraction.
The first is scale. Abstract paintings are more scale-dependent than representational ones, because a large field of colour behaves entirely differently at six feet than at eighteen inches. Whenever possible, see the work in person, and think honestly about the wall and the viewing distance it will have.
The second is condition, which is less forgiving in this field than collectors expect. Thick impasto is vulnerable to cracking and loss. Unvarnished matte surfaces mark easily and are difficult to clean. Mixed media work using collage or found material can have components ageing at different rates. None of this should deter a buyer, but all of it should be asked about.
If you are looking at abstract art for sale, buy the individual work rather than the name. Artists working over long careers produce uneven bodies of work, and a strong painting by a lesser-known artist is a better acquisition than a weak one by a famous one almost every time. You can browse the Windsor Betts abstract collection, or speak with us about a particular artist, period or scale you are considering.