ABSTRACT
The history of abstract art is often said to begin with Wassily Kandinsky and his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art of December 1911, together with his abstract compositional paintings of about the same time. This text, however, will sketch out a different trajectory: The emergence of abstract architecture from ornamental design. Similar to the artistic avant-garde of abstract painters and their intentional break with the Renaissance tradition of imitating nature, there is, around 1900, a rebellion amongst applied artists and architects against the notion of architecture as tectonic representation. The Flemish artist Henry van de Velde has been credited as innovator of abstract linear ornament with his contribution to the inaugural exhibition of the gallery L'Art Nouveau of Siegfried Bing in Paris in December 1895, which caused a scandal but provided the name for the entire movement.
