In the 19th century, when Impressionists like Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were breaking the mold of what art could look like, they faced harsh criticism. The French Académie des Beaux-Arts, which at the time held authority over how art was defined in the Western World, disavowed the works of Impressionists. Realism and portraiture were favored by critics at the time, but Impressionists made blurry, vague depictions of landscapes. 

In the 1940s, as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were annexing Europe, and fascism was being born, art and expression were under a microscope. This was especially the case under Hitler, who had a great love for Grecian and Roman classics; the control of art was a way to exercise control. Much like the Académie, Hitler believed art should look one specific way. Art that didn’t fit the mold was stolen or destroyed.

The place that abstract art―art that strays from realistic depictions―holds in the world has always been contentious. For some, art is meant to be representative. It is meant to be a beautiful display of the world around us. For some, the simple fact that abstract art exists is a smudge on the works of classicists.

Just because a Caravaggio is realism doesn’t mean that there isn’t more that lies beyond the first glance. His use of lighting, the movement in his lines; it all says something. Just because a Jackson Pollock might look like splatters of paint on canvas does not mean there is no story being told.

Abstract art is evocative. It can look simple, and hide so much depth in that simplicity.  It can look messy and have an interpretation hidden in plain sight. It can be stupid and mean nothing at all.

What makes abstract special, is the story can take time to find. And that the viewer can find more than one answer to what the piece asks.

Art shouldn’t look just one way. It shouldn’t make you feel just one way. Sometimes art is ugly and stupid and a joke. Sometimes the only point of a work of art is its existence. 

One of my favorite painters is Mark Rothko. He covered canvases with blocks of color and soft brush strokes. However, detractors of abstract art critique artists like Rothko and Yves Klein―painter of “Monochromatic Blue”―by saying that it’s just color. That, technique aside, it does not represent anything, it does not “mean” anything.

This is where the trap lies. Because abstract art does not need you to understand it for it to have meaning. You do not need to look at a Pollock and say, “Here is the sun and here is the sea, and this is why it is beautiful.” Maybe Pollock―and Rothko, and Klein, and Renoir, and Monet―weren’t creating for the critics. Maybe they were creating for themselves and for the simple act of creation. 

So much of art lies in the act of creating it. Often, the creation of a piece tells as much of a story as the final piece. Famously, Pablo Picasso’s “Blue Period” where he created dozens of paintings almost entirely in shades of blue, was brought on by the death of a friend.

A piece of art holds the history and context of the world that it was created in. Another Picasso piece, “Guernica,” was created in response to fascism in his home country of Spain. Dutch-Jewish painter, Piet Mondrian, who was forced flee Europe in World War II, helped birth the Neo-Plastic movement while Hitler was trying to eliminate modern art. Keith Haring was spurred by the AIDS crisis and his own battle with the disease.  

Art, no matter what it looks like or how it is presented, is in some way political. When an artist finds a way to show themselves, through a painting, through a photograph, through living exhibition, they are telling you something. And art movements such as Impressionism, Surrealism, and Dadaism, that run counter-culturally, say it loudest. Artists who refuse to follow rules help change the landscape for all who follow them.

Art has never fit into just one mold. Even the ancient Greeks—revered by lovers of classicism—are said to have painted outside of the lines. There isn’t a rulebook for expressing yourself.

Beauty is subjective. What one person finds beautiful and moving, might have a completely different impact on the person next to them. You don’t have to find abstract art beautiful. You don’t have to want to find it beautiful. But when you discredit its merit―the value that the artist instilled in it by creating it―you are creating a smaller world for yourself. Don’t go to the Museum of Modern art and try to figure out what every piece is trying to say. Stop trying to decipher the clues and allow yourself to see.