Geometric Abstraction in Art History: Between Western Avant-Gardes and Ornamental Traditions

The official history of geometric abstraction usually begins in 1915, when Kazimir Malevich exhibited his Black Square in Petrograd and proclaimed the advent of Suprematism — an art reduced to its pure geometric elements, freed from any figurative reference. This moment was followed, in the following decades, by Russian Constructivism, Piet Mondrian's Neoplasticism in the Netherlands, then by Op Art and Minimalism in the 1960s.

This genealogy, centred on Europe and the United States, obscures a broader reality: sophisticated geometric traditions had existed for centuries elsewhere in the world, particularly in Islamic art and North African cultures. The zellij compositions of Maghrebi monuments, the lozenge-patterned Berber rugs, calligraphic interlacing: so many formal systems resting on rigorous mathematical principles — symmetry, modular repetition, tessellation — without ever being theorised as an artistic movement in the Western sense of the term.

From the 1960s and 1970s onward, several non-Western artists explicitly claimed this parallel genealogy, refusing the idea that modern geometric abstraction was an exclusively European invention. This gesture made it possible to reconsider the history of abstraction as a plural phenomenon, developed simultaneously in several cultural spheres according to their own logics.

Over the past decade, this plural rereading of geometric abstraction has seen renewed institutional interest, driven by exhibitions and publications that place non-Western ornamental traditions at the heart of the history of abstract art, alongside the more traditionally taught European avant-gardes.

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