What I mean by abstract art, is an art whose techniques have been removed from the process of figuration and thence used in themselves. That is why, for example, Turner is sometimes nonfigurative, but never abstract. Pollock is a great example of abstract art.
which is used outside of figuration & affirmed as a technique. Painting, until modernism, very rarely showed its technique (Titian did), and when it did, one had a figurative end in mind. In this sense, impressionism is still deeply classical, a form of bourgeois classicism.