Stele comparison
As Didier Ottinger, the curator of Abstraction and Calligraphy – Towards a Universal Language explains: “Everywhere, images came before letters: in Egypt, China and Mesopotamia, as in the Americas, the first forms of writing were pictograms and ideograms, or stylised drawings. The advent of letters, of the alphabet, revolutionised writing. The shift from images to the written word inevitably involved loss, as if abandoning images gave rise to a nostalgia for meaning: letters no longer directly carried the meaning conveyed by images. The cost of this shift was a palpable draining of vigour, a dis-incarnation. From the Chinese (写: xiĕ), to the Greek (γγράφγράφειν ράφειν: graphein), via the Arabic ( :ُبُتْكَييَكْتُبُ yaktub), the respective verbs for “to write”, in their etymology, relate to pictures and painting. Western poets and writers taking the path of abstraction turned to non-European civilisations, in particular the Arab world and the Far East.

Title and date: Stela bearing an Egyptian inscription, ca. 170–163 BCE In the earliest systems of writing, images and words were inseparable. Signs referred directly to objects in the real world. With the emergence of the Greek alphabet, however, words lost their direct connection to the object, referring instead to the human voice. In the West, from this moment on, the visual quality of writing was largely lost. Images and words became separate.

Artist: Joaquin Torres-Garcia
Title and date: Composition universelle [Universal Composition], 1937 Abstraction is traditionally understood as an attempt to reduce painting to its basic elements (form, colour, line on flat support) by removing all non-essential references to language. However, this work by Joaquin Torres-Garcia tells a different story: instead of purifying painting, the artist attempts to rediscover the lost graphic quality of the first systems of writing.

Artist: R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler)
Title and date: Wird Zeichen Realität? 2 [Is Sign becoming a Reality? 2], 1982 In the universal story of writing, abstract artists do not break from the real world. They attempt to reconnect signs with reality. This work by A. R. Penck returns to the language of hieroglyphics by emphasising the physicality of the medium and the act of inscription. Black paint is coarsely applied to blank, white areas of canvas.
Blue Quran comparison
As explained by the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Scientific, Curatorial and Collections Management Director, Dr. Souraya Noujaim: “The sources of abstraction that might be said to have dominated 20th-century art are found in the attention that many artists paid to the varied signs, calligraphies and ideograms of non-Western cultures. Beyond the limits of immediate sensory experience, in an environment where letters are everywhere present in declamation, calligraphy and graffiti, Asia and North Africa were intuitively experienced as an essential model. This almost mystical dimension of gesture and letter finds an echo in the Arab Hurufiyya movement, whose importance in the development of contemporary abstraction should not be underestimated”.

Title and date: Page of the “Blue Quran”, ca. 900

Artist: Shakir Hassan Al Said
Title and date: Writing on the Wall, 1978

Artist: Georges Mathieu
Title and Date: Anneau de la princesse Honora [The Princess Honora’s Ring], 1961

Artist: Christian Dotremont
Title and Date: Parfois, ne fais qu’attendre : c’est vivre le temps même [Sometimes I Can Only Wait: Living Time Itself], 1971

Artist: Lee Ufan
Title and date: From Line, 1977
Comparison to zoomorphic calligram lion
From Wassily Kandinsky to André Masson, and from CY Twombly to Ghada Amer, the search for the “pictographic”, the exploration of an artistic path between pictures (picto-) and writing (-graphic), runs like a thread through the 20th century.

Title and date: Calligram, end of 17th century

Artist: Andre Masson
Title and date: Chimère [Chimera], 1944


Artist: Ghada Amer
Title and date: The Words I Love the Most, 2012

Artist: Enji Tōrei
Title and date: Enso, 18th century

Artist: Mark Tobey
Title and date: Untitled, 1954

Artist: Julius Bissier
Title and date: I8.I.65.3, 1965