“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. There’s no danger then anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark. It is what started the artist, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions.”
For the Spanish master, the creative process was strictly a ruthless act of distillation, stripping reality of its external appearances until the primal, figurative core was exposed. Picasso claimed that the artist is a slave to the impulse dictated by the object. It is impossible to escape the shadow of a table, a woman, or a guitar, because their physical and conceptual presence leaves an indelible mark on the structure of the surface.
In doing so, the Spaniard unwittingly carved a stake of exceptionally precise, ruthless dimensions, meant to pin abstract art to the ground. The diameter of this stake is the limit of human perception shaped by evolution, its length is an infinite chain of associations with anatomy and architecture, and its sharp point is the physical fact of using matter on a surface. According to him, a creator is not a god bringing new worlds into existence, but merely a manipulator altering the existing reality. Picasso’s mark is a declaration that the sensory umbilical cord cannot be severed, and any attempt to escape the object will always end in producing an empty, decorative ornament. Is he right?
Picasso sensed art’s drift toward pure decorativeness. He believed that cutting ties with the physical object dooms art to a worthless, lifeless formalism. He drew his opinion from the directions chosen by the abstraction of his time, accurately predicting the consequences of Kazimir Malevich’s non-objective world, which later manifested most fully in the post-war movement of Abstract Expressionism created by Rothko and Pollock.
Where then lies the boundary between illusion and truth?
Kazimir Malevich’s grand, mystical myth of creating a non-objective world hits a wall of reality in the pit he dug for himself. The creator of Suprematism wanted to completely liberate art from the weight of matter so that a pure, geometric order could fill the empty space left by religion. Hence the decision to hang the Black Square in the corner traditionally reserved for icons at the 0.10 exhibition, as a manifesto of a new, non-objective God. At this point, however, we walk into a trap set by the medium itself. Mathematics relies on abstraction, where numbers or logical relationships exist solely as pure concepts in the human intellect, devoid of weight, color, and texture. Yet a square as a formula is one thing, and the exact same shape brought by an artist onto a surface is another. In the split second of perception, through the use of a brush, pigment, or the matter of light, this alleged abstraction instantly materializes into a physical object with concrete dimensions and density, entering a spatial relationship with the viewer’s eye and the background, which we subconsciously read as three-dimensional air or a horizon.
Our own biology and evolution deliver the knockout blow to this illusion. The word geometry literally means measuring the earth, because since the dawn of civilization, humans have used the quadrangle, the plumb line, and the level as tools to tame matter and build shelters. The human brain, shaped by centuries of living inside architecture, does not commune with a cosmic absolute in a gallery. Instead, it sees in a square an archetypal floor plan, a blueprint of foundations, an outline of walls, or a window. This mechanism works identically to pareidolia, which forces us to frantically look for familiar patterns and see human faces in random rock formations on Mars. Our cognitive apparatus does not tolerate pure emptiness. A horizontal line immediately becomes the ground, a vertical line becomes a posture forced by gravity, and any arrangement of forces on a surface mimics physical laws of composition where forms seem heavier, lighter, pushed forward, or sinking into the depths. For a work on a surface to be pure abstraction, it would have to stop being visible. Malevich did not materialize the spirit; he created the most synthetic, simplified portrait of a man-made object. He created a Non-Objective World that was not abstract, it was meant to evoke pure sensations and the essences of painterly aesthetics instead of content. Picasso triumphs across the board: you can clean the frame of literal horses, women, or guitars, but as long as you operate with shape, spatial relationship, and surface, you are unconditionally operating with the figurative core and the craft of our material world, from whose shadow there is no escape.
However, only a confrontation between Picasso’s thesis and the two pillars of early abstraction reveals how deeply both remained trapped in the structures of the physical world they tried to emancipate themselves from. The legendary turning point in Kandinsky’s biography, when he failed to recognize the object in a Monet painting in Moscow, is the best proof of this. It is commonly believed that the Impressionist technique severed shape from meaning, while cognitive analysis exposes a simple conflict of conceptual frameworks. Kandinsky grew up in Eastern European culture, where haystacks were formed around a vertical pole into characteristic, slender, sharp cones. Meanwhile, Monet captured Norman meules, massive, craft-built stacks of wheat sheaves. These were gigantic, cylindrical structures topped with a regular thatch roof, which to a person from the East look more like African Zulu huts than the haystacks he knew from home. Kandinsky’s brain experienced a shock not because of a mystical communion with pure form, but because the Western agricultural object was a completely foreign visual signal to his cognitive apparatus, further broken down by shimmering patches of light. The second famous anecdote about entering his studio at dusk, when he was enchanted by a painting devoid of a subject, only to recognize it moments later as his own landscape turned upside down, also turns out to be a cognitive flip-flop. Kandinsky merely experienced a temporary optical illusion caused by the twilight. The artist himself later admitted that this accidental operation could not be repeated as a conscious creative method. A deliberately inverted landscape did not become an abstraction; it was merely an incorrectly hung view in which the brain still persistently hunted for figuration. The starting point for these formal arrangements remained the physical object. Exactly the same mechanism is visible in the evolutionary path of Piet Mondrian’s trees, which were never an independent abstraction, but an extremely simplified skeleton of real nature filtered through geometry. Building his later theory on an analogy to music, Kandinsky paradoxically did not escape into pure metaphysics either. Musicality is not an abstraction but a real physical phenomenon based on a measurable acoustic wave, frequency, and the mathematical rigor of time that resonates directly with human biology. Seeking a spiritual impulse, he simply transferred another branch of material reality onto the surface.
Mondrian, on the other hand, aiming for a structured absolute through Neo-Plasticism, walked a path that actually legitimizes Picasso’s intuition. His rigorous reduction, running from the organic forms of trees and architecture down to a grid of black verticals, horizontals, and three primary colors, was not the birth of a new world, but the ultimate, sterile distillation of the old one. Furthermore, Mondrian tried to escape literalness through a specific symbolic code, assigning a dynamic masculine element to vertical lines and a static feminine element to horizontal ones. This move, instead of freeing the image from the shackles of matter, rooted its geometry even deeper in earthly structures. Instead of a pure cosmic order, the viewer receives a highly simplified map of sexuality, biology, and gravity. Both Kandinsky’s emotional, synesthetic afterimage and Mondrian’s geometric skeleton, when subjected to cognitive analysis, turn out to be merely a profound transcription of nature. The umbilical cord was not cut, and every mark on the surface, even one pretending to be the absolute, carries the inalienable genotype of its physical starting point.
Artists like Mark Rothko also had to face this problem, yet for them, the starting point was an attempt to visualize a pure emotional state. Rothko’s color fields, vibrating on the surface, were intentionally not rooted in landscape or anatomy. They were an attempt to touch the absolute, the void, the sacrum, or dread, concepts that by definition have no physical, three-dimensional equivalents in the natural world. It was meant to be a materialization of the spirit, not a distillation of matter. However, we must touch the weakest point of the entire mythology surrounding Rothko and his peers. No one has ever proven that these color fields represent any specific emotional state. This entire narrative of materializing the spirit relies exclusively on a social contract, an authorial myth, and the literary overinterpretation of critics. If we let people into a room at Tate Modern who had never heard of this artist, cut them off from the curatorial descriptions on the walls, and asked them what they saw, none of them would use grand words about the absolute. They would say they see large, colored surfaces with blurred edges. The entire emotional state is pumped into the work from the outside, through text. Without the legend of how Rothko suffered from depression, these paintings stop radiating tragedy and become a pure, formal study of color and light. The image does not generate emotion; the narrative around it forces the viewer into a specific mood.
The mark Picasso spoke of exists for abstract art as an inevitable force of gravity. It is the fear of this mark that explains why Pollock or Rothko at some point fled from literary narratives toward raw numbers. Paradoxically, the art market and critics pumped figurative and poetic titles back into their works, such as Earth and Green, No. 61 (Rust and Blue), or Lavender Mist, because without text, the average viewer was completely lost. This same fear of the figurative core explains why both tried to bypass the viewer’s logical thinking, appealing exclusively to the structures of the subconscious. Jackson Pollock, acting in an automatic frenzy, induced a trance where the act of painting became a pure, kinetic record of bodily automatism, a ritual, and a release of primal energy. Rothko approached this problem completely differently. His method was deeply psychological, introverted, and contemplative, based on a cold, almost laboratory space of immersion where massive, pulsating planes of color acted as a psychological resonator. Both, however, through monumental scale, wanted to completely flood the viewer’s field of vision. Rothko even demanded that the viewer look at his large canvases from extreme proximity, from a distance of just forty-five centimeters, trying to mechanically blind the evolutionary mechanisms of the eye. Yet contemporary cognitive science and optics mercilessly expose the technical naivety of this method. When we approach a three-meter canvas from a distance of fifteen centimeters, the entire illusion of image, shape, and composition instantly dies. The division between object and background vanishes, spatial relationships disappear, and the brain loses its points of reference. Instead of mystical transcendence, a total destruction of the data structure and a mechanical reset of the cognitive apparatus occur. From up close, you no longer see the cosmic absolute because you do not see any shape. Only the raw, physical noise of the matrix remains: the weave of the canvas threads, a lump of pigment, a streak of paint.
The problem is that cognitive science proves you cannot do it this way. Phenomenal consciousness will always operate on a fascination with matter, and only its connection with access consciousness creates a mind capable of operating in a world of pure concepts.
When designing her cosmic language, Hilma af Klint did not ground it in universal symbols, but subconsciously relied on a structure resembling Jerry Fodor’s language of thought, which assumed that the mind operates on internal, purely abstract codes detached from matter. This concept was ruthlessly debunked in 1989 by Stevan Harnad’s symbol grounding problem, proving that non-objective signs and letters remain mere empty messages for the cognitive apparatus until they are linked to the evolutionary, sensory, and physical experience of the body in the world. Lacking this knowledge, af Klint submerged her conceptual skeleton in an organic, mystical biomorphism, using spirals reminiscent of shells or flower buds. This allowed Picasso’s mark to strike back as a ricochet, giving curators an excuse to bring her cosmic text back down to earth. Yet af Klint’s clash with the rest of the modernist pantheon resembles the unique, isolated ecosystem of ancient New Zealand. The male abstractionists Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and later Rothko or Pollock were like the great, flightless Moa birds. Though powerful, proud, and dominant in their territory, they moved exclusively on hard, physical ground. Their gaze, even when lifted upward, remained focused on the plane of the soil, gravity, and the biological constraints of the eye. They were prisoners of the patch of earth they tried to redefine. Hilma af Klint was the Haast’s eagle in this world, a predator of a completely different scale and incomparable reach. She lived at the same time, in the same ecosystem, but saw the world from a perspective that was physically unattainable for the Moa birds. She soared at the altitude of pure conceptual structures, looking down at matter as a subordinate element of a larger system. While they painstakingly deconstructed the table and the guitar, she mapped the world of thoughts. Af Klint’s legacy remains an autonomous manifestation of abstraction at both the conceptual and material levels. A level of a different reality was achieved, one that the rest of the pantheon did not even come close to.
And that is the real stake driven into the heart of classical abstraction. Picasso, so often deconstructed by contemporary critics today as a ruthless predator in his private life, unintentionally passed judgment on the entire male pantheon of modernists by formulating the theory of the inalienable mark. He demonstrated that their revolution was a superficial, sterilely flattened facelift of figuration hidden behind a facade of mystical ornamentation. Picasso was absolutely right about everyone art history placed on pedestals. He did not foresee, however, that outside the academy’s radar operated a woman who was the only one to truly take up the fight to sever the umbilical cord of matter. The pantheon of modernists turned out to be a flock of flightless birds. True abstraction was not born in the noise of manifestos and the throwing of squares into empty spaces left by icons. It arrived from above, silently, on the wings of an eagle whose male eye noticed it only when it was already too late to defend its own myth.