Comparative History of the Autonomy of Form

Abstract

This paper does not ask who first “invented” pictorial abstraction—a question that presupposes a single, implicitly Eurocentric origin. It asks instead how many independent visual traditions rendered form autonomous from its depicted subject, and through which internal logics. Grounded in a comparative dataset of fifty works drawn from eight cultural areas (China, Japan, India, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, Oceania, the pre-colonial Americas, the Islamic world), dated from the second millennium BCE to the twentieth century, the analysis records for each work the dominant visual phenomenon, the relation to the visible (mimetic, transformed, non-mimetic), the type of relation to its own tradition (internal, documented transmission, open hypothesis), and the primary museum source. The autonomy of form emerges as a recurrent and structurally plural phenomenon articulated through four distinct logics: calligraphic gesture and active emptiness (China, Japan); ritual and cosmological geometry (India, Africa, Oceania, the Americas); atmospheric and perceptual dissolution (Europe); and doctrinal aniconism (Islamic world). The paper offers neither a linear genealogy nor a claim of priority, but a shared methodological framework and an explicitly incomplete, improvable corpus for future comparative research.