Abstraction shook Western art to its core. At the beginning of the 20th century, it broke away from the dictates of clear, indisputable norms, radically departing from any form of naturalism and confronting the viewer with an unprecedented new art, devoid of any conventional, representational imagery. Artists of various styles found their own individual paths to abstraction, so that this term can only serve as a collective designation for styles that, like Cubism, abstracted from the real object or actually became a purely non-representational art—such as Constructivism and Suprematism, both of which originated in the Russian avant-garde.

Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, Color Field Painting, Tachisme-Informel, Op Art, Automatism, Concrete Art, Concept Art, Minimalism—all of these belong to abstract art, where only form, line, color, and movement matter, structure and composition come to the forefront, and only the freedom of the artist counts.

This introduction showcases the entire spectrum of abstract art. From early Cubism and Futurism to Op Art and Minimalism, it follows the paths and forms that non-figurative art explored and traversed from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1960s. It presents Jackson Pollock's Action Painting, Piet Mondrian's geometric forms, Kazimir Malevich's black square, and Wassily Kandinsky's complex compositions, as well as works by Picasso, Klee, Kline, and Rothko, along with pieces by less prominent figures such as Antoni Tàpies, K.O. Götz, Ad Reinhardt, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.