Abstract art

Wassily Kandinsky is generally regarded as the pioneer of abstract art. However, a Swedish woman called Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) might claim that title

The show at Tate St Ives this summer explores the international context which shaped the work of artists in the Cornish town from the 1940s to 1960s. As Éric de Chassey writes, the broad exchange of ideas was not limited to American artists such as Rothko and de Kooning, but extended to French painters such as Nicolas de Staël, which would also reflect a shared interest in nature and landscape

The curator of the forthcoming exhibition by the German abstract painter introduces her work, and a fellow artist pays homage

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted

Fauvism is the name applied to the work produced by a group of artists (which included Henri Matisse and André Derain) from around 1905 to 1910, which is characterised by strong colours and fierce brushwork

Name given by the artist Kazimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913 characterised by basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colours

Constructivism was a particularly austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915

An early form of abstract art characterised by interacting linear forms derived from rays of light

Term invented by artist Robert Delaunay to describe the abstract painting developed by him and his wife Sonia Delaunay from about 1910

Term used to describe the non-geometric abstract art that developed in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s characterized by spontaneous brushwork, drips and scribble-like marks

Neo-plasticism is a term adopted by the Dutch pioneer of abstract art, Piet Mondrian, for his own type of abstract painting which used only horizontal and vertical lines and primary colours

Concrete art is abstract art that is entirely free of any basis in observed reality and that has no symbolic meaning

The term objective abstraction refers to a non-geometric style of abstract art developed by a group of British artists in 1933

Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterised by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity

Minimalism is an extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s and typified by artworks composed of simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle

Post-painterly abstraction is a blanket term covering a range of new developments in abstract painting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, characterised by a more rigorous approach to abstraction

Op art was a major development of painting in the 1960s that used geometric forms to create optical effects

Non-objective art defines a type of abstract art that is usually, but not always, geometric and aims to convey a sense of simplicity and purity

Art informel is a French term describing a swathe of approaches to abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s which had in common an improvisatory methodology and highly gestural technique

Also known as art informel, art autre translates as 'art of another kind' and was used to describe the dominant trend of abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s characterised by an improvisatory approach and highly gestural technique

Gestural is a term used to describe the application of paint in free sweeping gestures with a brush

In art, automatism refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process

Abstraction-Création was an association of abstract artists set up in Paris in 1931 with the aim of promoting abstract art through group exhibitions

American Abstract Artists (AAA) is an organisation founded in 1936 to promote the appreciation of abstract art in the United States

De Stijl was a circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals

Penwith Society of Arts is an artists' society formed in 1948 at St Ives, Cornwall, Britain by artists working in an abstract style

Cercle et Carré was an artist group formed in Paris in 1929 which strongly supported new developments in abstract art and in particular promoted mystical tendencies within it

The Salon des Réalités nouvelles (new realities) was an exhibiting society devoted to pure abstract art founded in Paris in 1939

Formed in London in 1919 The Seven and Five Society was initially a traditional group and can be seen as a British manifestation of the return to order that followed the First World War

Bauhaus was a revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919