In 1924, Pablo Picasso filled sixteen pages of a sketchbook with pen and ink drawings that resembled the constellation figures of star atlases. Biographer John Richardson describes these sketches as being inspired by the night sky but also related to themes that Picasso had explored in earlier abstract works. While these drawings were relatively minor experiments in Picasso’s career, they do relate to a wider phenomenon in early twentieth-century art that links astronomical themes to modes of abstract representation.

An aspect of the human connection to the cosmos is the act of projecting imagery onto the random patterns of stars in the night sky. The sky becomes a picture of creatures, people or objects from the terrestrial world. Part of this projection is based on the phenomenon of pareidolia, the tendency to perceive recognizable imagery in random visual patterns. But another aspect of this celestial picture-making is the thoughtful construction of a new order from raw visual material. In this respect, the process of transforming object to pattern and back again is similar to the ways in which artists have, historically, utilized abstraction as a way of discovering and exploring the physical, emotional, and psychological world.

This paper is an examination of the intersection of astronomical themes with abstraction in art. While abstraction from nature is a feature of art across history, this paper will look primarily at the stylistic revolutions of Modernism before the Second World War. The many forms of abstraction that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century lent themselves to both expressive and conceptual reflections on the relationship of humans to the night sky. Some artists, such as Picasso, used this newfound freedom to reexamine the way we interpret the expressive potential of certain visual elements suggested by the sky. Others, such as Joan Miro, were drawn to the symbolic and allegorical significance of astronomical phenomena. The former used abstraction as a formal tool of visual synthesis, the latter as a mechanism for exploring the unconscious mind. Artists were also inspired by early twentieth-century views on cosmology, where abstraction allowed them to examine ideas about time, space, and the physics and metaphysics of the universe rather than discrete visual phenomena. The results were works of art, such as those by Wassily Kandinsky, that moved from the abstract to the non-objective in a creative effort to capture the ineffable and metaphysical dimensions of the cosmos.

Gary Wells
Ithaca College