“The history of abstract art is a reflection of the history of this transformation. With Cezanne, the materiality of the object comes to a poignant end. In Cubism, the burgeoning commodity-culture of the new Twentieth Century, and its inhabitants are transformed into a gray world of abstract planes and vectors. With Mondrian, a decade later, any reference to specificity is gone and the world is described as an utopian grid of abstract flows and forces. If Mondrian emphasized the systematization in this situation, Abstract Expressionism reflects the alienation to which this system gives rise. Systemized space is revealed as emptied of meaning. This is the reality with which the empty spaces of Rothko, for example, are filled. Thus the history of abstract art is the history of a real progression in the social. It is the history of the organization of the compartmentalized spaces and the formal systems that make up the abstract world.”
Peter Halley