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These problems fundamentally, from Gorky's point of view, revolve around the question of space. This is space not in a Kantian metaphysical sense, but in the sense that in the plastic arts a form, a shape, an object, must logically occupy a given space. The predominant concern of the painter, therefore, from this point of view, is to achieve this occupation of space by an object by means proper to the medium of painting.

From this point of view, also, sheerly technical considerations are of secondary importance. How, asks Gorky, can an artist give himself exclusively to problems of grinding pigment or using an airbrush or some kind of new paint, when the all-obsessing problem of form in space has not been solved? This means in his case that he is not interested abstractly in materials. Yet he is interested in technic as a method of creating form.  And he adds, how can one separate method from the artist's intention and creation?

In his designs for the Newark Airport, Gorky has concerned himself with forms derived for aviation and from the airplane. But since scientific invention is ever changing, he does not wish to use these forms in a literal spirit, because the airplanes of today will obsolete in a few years, but a mural should certainly be able to speak to people of the future in a language above the purely topical idiom. So it is the forms of an airplane in an abstract and essential mood which Gorky has utilized in his designs, wings seen as almost straight lines, as they actually look when viewed in profile, a rudder, an aileron, an instrument board, a wheel, a lamp, a cylinder, insignia from the underwings and from the fuselage, all distilled to theri ultimate expression.