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Abstract art gives prominence to the color, shape and volume as visual subjects all their own. Interpreting the play of form and color involves engaging with color meanings viscerally. Whether you are looking at a Fauvist painting as Franz Marc's Blue Horse series or an abstract expressionist painting as Wassily Kandinsky's The Blue Rider, color announces itself as part of an abstract artist's private alphabet, rich in associative significance. If the Fauvists like Franz Marc and Marc Chagall took the use of color as a subject further than the abstract impressionists, these early modernist painters also handled color with an eye to abstraction. They could use bold brushstrokes or a fine pointillist brushwork reminiscent of digital pixilation to depict figures vividly out of their component colors, as if a flower or a beach on the Riviera were defined by a very selective palette created by internal pigments or natural light. The colors of paints are visible either due to pigmentation that absorbs light selectively, or the use of a substance such as shell or quartz to refract the light. The brightness of white paints that are refractory can create luminescent effects in which the light within a painting seems to shift. Black pigments instead absorb light fully. Monet and several other impressionists came to avoid black in their work, on the observation that the color black occurs only rarely in nature. More abstract paintings use black and white extensively. When other colors are introduced, this has a startling effect. A composition using bold primary colors and extensive white space as one of Piet Mondrian's "lozenge" paintings lends extra brilliance and conceptual importance to the colors chosen. Much contemporary abstract art and modern decor have been influenced by Mondrian's elegant geometric paintings, which use only the primary colors (red, yellow and blue) in addition to black and white. Franz Marc tells his audience, "Blue is the male principle, austere and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, bright and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy, the color with the other two have to fight against and overcome!" He is describing a painting in which a blue horse backlit in yellow stands atop red and green hills, with additional hills in purple and blue rolling behind it in the distance. The strong contrasts of red and green in the foreground help establish a sense of conflict he describes among the primary colors while intermediary hills in a purplish red add a sense of continuity in spatial perspective between rear- and foreground. Kandinsky's Blue Rider places a man on horseback against a large green field in vivid brushstrokes that evoke blurred vision from rapid motion. Color dominates this expressionist painting, and of the choice of blues in this and other work Kandinsky said "when [blue] sinks almost too black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. When it rises toward white .. its appeal to men grows weaker and more distant." Here the color is dark, and an improbably deep blue shadow is cast by both the running horse and rider, and overhanging clouds nearby. Behind on the hilltop orange foliage on pale trees creates a warm contrast in the sunlight, while further, back distant hills are visible in the same deep blue. Kandinsky's village scenes use a deep blue for both open sky and shadow. He favors the same almost purple shade of blue in his abstract Improvisation series, as well. In the increasingly abstract painting Reiter (Lyrishes), a rider is sketched in black lines on a horse with fully extended legs. The jockey's boots are hitched high in racing stirrups, in a yellow line that extends the curve of the horse's outstretched neck, while the riding jacket is filled in as an arched green field. The contrasting colors of the rider's jacket and boots help accentuate the athletic poise of the racing figure, and a teal green field above the rider frames the picture, while blue, purple and red fields occur on the other three sides, rounding the painting's corners diagonally just as a horserace takes place around an elliptical field. Each color range has an internal dynamic as well as a relationship with the rider, incompletely filled in or experimenting with different shades of color that create a lyrical play of shadow and light. This painting captures the sense in which abstracting color from a figure ultimately creates a composition in which color is the subject, and the figure only illuminates it.
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