Toward Abstraction Ranking European Painters of the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract. Paris was the unrivaled capital of modern art in the nineteenth century, but during the early twentieth century major innovations began to be made elsewhere in Europe. The author examined the careers of the artists who led such movements as Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, Holland's De Stijl, and Russia's Suprematism. Quantitative analysis revealed the implications of the conceptual basis of the art of Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Kazimir Malevich, and Edvard Munch, and of the experimental origin of the innovations of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian. The finding that the invention of abstract art was made nearly simultaneously by the conceptual Malevich and the experimental Kandinsky and Mondrian particularly indicates the importance of both deductive and inductive approaches in the history of modern art.