ABSTRACTION-CRATION

group composed predominantly of French painters led by Georges Vantongerloo and Auguste Herbin who promoted the principles of pure abstraction in art from 1931 to 1936. These abstractionists were devoted, in theory if not in practice, to the pure use of the basic formal elements of painting, colour and form, depicted pictorially as flat, brightly coloured geometric shapes. The immediate predecessor of the Abstraction-Cration group was the Cercle et Carr ("Circle and Square") group, founded by Michel Seuphor and Joaquin Torres-Garcia in 1930. In 1931 Abstraction-Cration, a periodical published by Herbin and Jean Hlion, took over the Cercle et Carr's mailing list; and the new Abstraction-Cration group, with as many as 400 members, carried on in the direction of geometric abstraction until 1936. It was located in Paris and hence received the active membership of Wassily Kandinsky and Naum Gabo, both of whom were living there at the time. It was succeeded after World War II by the Salon des Ralits Nouvelles ("Salon of New Realities").