The work of Paul Cezanne, and landscapes, was the spark that lit Picasso's match which ignited Cubism.
Though Cubism was never completely abstract in the non-representational sense, it, in turn, was the torch sitting
 off the Abstract Expressionist explosion marking the second third of the twentieth century. When we think of
 Abstract Expressionism, typically we think in terms of the New York of the forties and fifties, and certainly,
 this is there the movement matured and came into its own But seeds go back a generation before to the work of
 artists such as Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian, and ultimately MalevichThese were the planters Hoffman, Jackson, and
 gardners nurturing, and reaping the rewards of what were basically European seeds transplanted to
 America. Each of the planters ; brought their own; to the movement.
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genes were symbolic with a trace of surrealism. Mondrian's roots were pure Cubism.
 Kandinsky's contribution was quite literally an epiphany of color. It is said that he discovered the
 &quot;inherent expressive properties of color divorced from the world one evening after a
 long day of painting. He was struck by an image of extraordinary
 beauty, full of inner radiance which had eluded him in his struggle to unleash it in his landscape painting.
 vision turned out to be one of his earlier paintings accidentally placed upside down, thus destroying it's  representational composition. From that
 moment on, color began to take on an almost importance to Kandinsky. 
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 On the very opposite side of the coin, the Russian painter, Malevich implanted the dada mentality of Eastern Europe
  within the Abstract Expressionist family tree carreer tragically at odds with the turbulent political upheavals of
   Mother Russia in the Post-World War One era, Malevich's work aspired to a visual and compositional purity eschewing
    very nearly every single element of design known to man.<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&nbsp; </span>In a 1918 painting entitled
 &quot;White on White&quot;, his basic off-white, off-balance square on a white square <span
class=SpellE>canvase</span> contrived to stretch the very definition of painted art almost to the breaking point.
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&nbsp; </span>Yet, his &quot;less is more&quot; theories injected an element of
 subtlety into Abstract Expressionism that was to influence the American branch of this organic art from
 Frankenthaler, Rothko, and Pollock to the so called &quot;Minimalist&quot; movement in the 1960's.
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