Why abstract artists chose pure emotion over realism

HostMost of us have stood in front of a painting that's just a few big lines or a giant block of red and wondered what happened. For hundreds of years, art was about how well you could paint a bowl of fruit or a king on a horse, and then, almost overnight, the world on the canvas seemed to break apart.

HostWhy did artists suddenly decide that showing the world as it looks simply wasn't enough anymore?

GuestFor a long time, painters were the only ones who could keep a memory alive. If you were a rich merchant and you wanted people to know you had a fancy house and a beautiful family, you had to hire a painter. The painter's job was to be a human camera. But then, around the middle of the eighteen hundreds, the actual camera showed up. Suddenly, a little wood box could do in a second what took a painter months to do, and the box was much more accurate. This created a big problem. If a machine can show the world exactly as it's, what's a painter for? They had to find a new job. They realized they didn't have to compete with the camera. They could do something the camera could not. They could paint what it felt like to be in a room, or the heat of the sun, rather than just the shape of the sun.

HostThat sounds a bit like they were just trying to stay relevant because they lost their main gig. Was it really a deep choice, or were they just backed into a corner?

GuestIt was a bit of both, but being backed into a corner made them look inward instead of outward. For thousands of years, art was like a window. You looked through the frame to see a story or a place. These artists decided to close the window and look at the wall itself. Think about a tree. A camera takes a photo of the bark and the leaves. But an artist might look at that same tree and feel how old it's, or how lonely it looks standing in a heavy fog. You can't really photograph the feeling of being lonely. So they started using colors that weren't really there in real life. If a tree felt sad to them, maybe they painted it a deep, dark blue. Once you start changing the colors and the shapes to match a mood, you eventually realize you might not even need the tree at all to tell the story. You can just paint the blue and the heaviness.

HostBut if you just paint the blue, how am I supposed to know it's about a tree? If I walk into a gallery and see a blue smudge, it feels like the artist is asking me to do all the work.

GuestIn a way, they are. They wanted to talk to your heart without going through your eyes first. There was a very famous painter named Kandinsky who actually had a brain that mixed up his senses. When he heard music, he saw colors. When he saw colors, he heard sounds. To him, a yellow circle wasn't just a shape. It was the sharp, bright sound of a trumpet. He thought that if a composer could write a song that made you feel happy or scared without using words, then a painter should be able to do the same thing with just shapes and colors. He called it the inner need. He believed the soul has a language of its own, and that language doesn't need to look like a bowl of fruit to be real.

HostI get the music part, but music has a beat and a melody. It has a structure we all kind of understand. A bunch of lines on a page feels much more like a mess than a song does.

GuestIt can feel that way, but those lines have their own kind of rhythm if you give them a chance. Think about it like this. Some lines are sharp and jagged and move fast across the page, kind of like a scream or a bolt of lightning. Other lines are smooth and slow and curvy, like a lullaby or the roll of a hill. The artists were trying to find a way to talk to people that everyone understands, which didn't depend on what language you spoke. If I paint a picture of a specific church in a small town, only the people from that town really get the full meaning. But if I paint a jagged, dark shape that feels like a sharp poke in the ribs, anyone anywhere can feel that tension. They wanted to reach the part of you that feels things before your brain even names what you're looking at. Then, everything got pushed even further when the Great War started.

HostSo they weren't just bored of painting trees. They were trying to find a way to talk about a world that didn't make sense anymore.

GuestWhen the whole world is falling apart and millions of people are dying, painting a pretty vase of flowers starts to feel like a lie. It feels small and fake. Many artists felt like the old world was gone forever, so the old way of painting had to go with it. They felt they had to build a whole new way of seeing from scratch. Some used straight lines and very simple colors to try and find some kind of order while the real world was in total chaos. They were trying to be more honest than they had ever been. To them, a big red square was more honest than a painting of a person because the red square isn't pretending to be anything else. It's just paint on a flat surface, but it carries all that heat and energy directly to you.

GuestThe biggest mystery left is whether we can ever truly see a shape without trying to turn it into a thing we know.

HostThat big red square on the wall isn't a picture of a fire, but it burns just as bright when you stand in front of it.