Abstraction-Création

Abstraction-Création, association of international painters and sculptors that from 1931 to 1936 promoted the principles of pure abstraction in art.

The immediate predecessor of the Abstraction-Création group was the Cercle et Carré (“Circle and Square”) group, founded by Michel Seuphor and Joaquin Torres-Garcia in 1930. Artists Georges Vantongerloo, Jean Hélion, and Auguste Herbin worked together to form a similar association, and by 1931 they managed to attract over 40 members to a group they called Abstraction-Création. That same year an annual periodical published by Hélion and Herbin, Abstraction-Création, debuted and took over the Cercle et Carré’s mailing list. The members whose work was represented in the first issue of the journal did not have a unified style, but rather they came from a variety of international movements that promoted formal purity and nonobjectivity: members Theo van Doesberg and Piet Mondrian were active in De Stijl (“The Style”), László Moholy-Nagy came from the Bauhaus, and Robert Delaunay practiced elements of late Cubism. While its central members leaned toward geometric abstraction, as a group Abstraction-Création advocated the general cause of abstraction and actively promoted it through its journal and regular exhibitions of its members’ work.

The loosely affiliated association, which was centred in Paris, eventually counted over 400 members, including international artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Naum Gabo, Josef Albers, Arshile Gorky, and Barbara Hepworth, most of whom lived in Paris for a time. The group’s last journal appeared in 1936. Abstraction-Création’s advocacy of abstraction was taken up after World War II by the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (“Salon of New Realities”).