There are over 75 different distinct art styles categorized today, but one of my favorites to do and see is abstract art. Art comes in 7 different forms and abstract can be applied to all of them. There’s painting, literature, sculpting, architecture, cinema, music, and theater. It is most popularly applied in sculpture and painting. Abstract art started to take its appearance in our world in the late 19th century as the realism style began to slow down. The style fully emerged and flourished in the 20th century. 

The first known abstract artist was Wassily Kandinsky, who was born on December 16, 1866, in Moscow. He was raised in a well-to-do family of a businessman in a good cultural environment. In 1871, the family moved to Odessa, where his father ran his tea factory. There, alongside attending grammar school. The boy learned to play the piano and the cello and took to drawing with a coach. “I remember that drawing and a little bit later painting lifted me out of the reality”, he wrote later. His parents wanted him to be a lawyer, but he found a love for painting and drawing. He spent his years figuring out colors and combinations while working on and improving his art. Toward the end of his career, he made over 610 different pieces of artwork. 

What is abstract, though? “The term can be applied to art that is based on an object, figure, or landscape, where forms have been simplified or schematized. It is also applied to art that uses forms, such as geometric shapes or gestural marks, which have no source at all in external visual reality. Some artists of this ‘pure’ abstraction have preferred terms such as concrete art or non-objective art, but in practice, the word abstract is used across the board and the distinction between the two is not always obvious.” (Tate.org) It is unseemingly, but a very important type of art.