Figurative artwork deliberately represents something in the physical world, in contrast with abstract art, which has no real-world referents. Most of the history of art has been driven by the idea of mimesis —representation or imitation of the natural world. The earliest known paintings, on the walls of caves in France and Spain, are figurative: they represent the outlines of the painters’ hands and images of animals. During the Renaissance, artists made an effort to scientifically represent the way people perceive the world. They invented the system of linear perspective, a way of creating a two dimensional image that appeared to exist in three dimensions. In combination with foreshortening, a way of distorting forms to make them appear three dimensional, painters were able to make images that appeared as windows into their intimate worlds.

Not until the end of the nineteenth century did artists begin to make nonfigurative art, which possessed an independent visual reality. A gray area exists between figurative and abstract art: for example, Cubism, while abstracted, maintains a connection to the world of things. Cubist artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque rejected linear perspective and distorted the shape of the objects they painted, but still took objects as their subject. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Russian Constructivist artists like Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko separated from visual reality altogether. They created early example of pure abstraction by painting geometric shapes of solid colors.