Viewing page 43 of 60

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

   With these forms he seeks to occupy the space given him, the walls allocated to the mural. These spaces are rectangular, they are two dimensional, they are solid constructions of masonry. And the artist must not violate their essential function, which is a supporting and protecting one. Therefore his design must not seem to break through the wall or to shatter the wall; his design must really occupy the pace it is intended for and not seek to move outward in a three-dimensional disruptive way.
   Yet since the artist has a theme, "Aviation," he must create more than the inanimate forms of his subject matter; he must create also the mood of aviation, or flying. This mood is suspension in space, the sense of objects floating in space. And moreover the mood is bound to be colored by that thing which differentiates the 20th century from the 19th, the technical and scientific integrations involved in the machine. This differentia Gorky calls "the operation of our time." And he amplifies this by explaining how the original material is lost through this operation, as the linen or raw silk of the wing's fuselage becomes not a textile but a sustaining member of the heavier-than-air flying machine. For this it is necessary, he states, to have a dialectical organization of forms so that "the beautiful miracle of our times, the miracle of the engineer, of the scientists, of the artist" may be fully realized in the painting. Here obviously those qualities of his being which made him study to be a civil engineer express themselves.
   The intellectually stimulating aspect of Gorky's equipment for painting this mural is suggested when he quotes Heraclitus as writing that a part is more beautiful than a whole. Here indeed is the keynote of abstract painting, this insistence that metonymy is a legitimate device of the painter as it is the rhetorician. This quality of Gorky's mind is a