


2023 These one-of-a-kind pieces are fabricated with reclaimed wood and are often asymmetrical in design, featuring hand-sewn cushions with abstract shapes quilted onto the surface. 2023 This Houston landmark features 14 soul-stirring paintings by abstract artist Mark Rothko. Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 27 Apr. 2023 Of all the abstract expressionists, de Kooning has clearly had the biggest impact on Brown. Seth Combs, San Diego Union-Tribune, 30 Apr. Marion Renault, The New Republic, And whereas her previous works were much more blatant (for example, a 2020 work featured a body on a plastic meat tray), her new work is more abstract in nature. The adjective, meaning “derived or descended,” is now obsolete, as is a sense of the noun that overlapped with abstract, “summary.” The words intersected and have separated in modern English, but it’s easy to see that abstract applies to something that has been summarized, and summarized means “extracted from a larger work.”Īdjective The threat is too abstract for imagination alone to grasp. The idea of “removing” or “pulling away” connects abstract to extract, which stems from Latin through the combination of trahere with the prefix ex-, meaning “out of” or “away from.” Extract forms a kind of mirror image of abstract: more common as a verb, but also used as a noun and adjective. Interestingly, the word passed from Latin into French with competing spellings as both abstract (closer to the Latin) and abstrait (which reflected the French form of abstrahere, abstraire), the spelling retained in modern French. We trace the origins of abstract to the combination of the Latin roots ab-, a prefix meaning “from” or “away,” with the verb trahere, meaning “to pull” or “to draw.” The result was the Latin verb abstrahere, which meant “to remove forcibly” or “to drag away.” Its past participle abstractus had the meanings “removed,” “secluded,” “incorporeal,” and, ultimately, “summarized,” meanings which came to English from Medieval Latin. The verb abstract is used to mean “summarize,” as in “abstracting an academic paper.” This meaning is a figurative derivative of the verb’s meanings “to remove” or “to separate.”

The Crisscrossing Histories of Abstract and ExtractĪbstract is most frequently used as an adjective (“abstract ideas”) and a noun (“an abstract of the article”), but its somewhat less common use as a verb in English helps to clarify its Latin roots.
