Biographical / historical:

The exploration of form and color for their own sake is one of the distinctive features of twentieth-century art. In the first decades of this century, artists such as Robert Delaunay, Kasimir Malevich, and Wassily Kandinsky pioneered the creation of so-called non-objective art. Their approach turned away from the world of recognizable things and adopted a vocabulary of abstract shapes, lines, colors, and textures. For some artists, especially Kandinsky, these abstract components did not lose their representational purpose; instead of representing things in the visible world, they visualized spiritual or emotional forces that could not be seen with the naked eye.

For others, however, art gave up its representational role entirely. In works here by Alexander Calder, Ad Reinhardt, and Donald Judd, it would probably be fruitless to search for any represented "subject" visible or invisible. Instead, the purpose of the work is to express the simple material qualities of the thing itself. Thus, the interest in the Reinhardt, for example, lies largely in the extraordinary optical effect created by the subtle differences in shades of black that comprise its abstract grid. In the Judd, we are invited to sense volume, while the Calder mobile embraces the play of random motion.

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