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Stella TALK 
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During the first 20 years of the 20th century almost everything that happened in painting pointed to the growth of abstraction, and its seemingly inevitable triumph over realism. Sixty years later, after a number of ups and downs, abstraction appears to be in a dominant position, but nonetheless, it still falls far short of victory.

For abstraction, the most important change of direction in painting in the 20th century was made by Picasso when he turned away from cubism to his classical figure paintings of the 1920's. What happened is that Picasso, for reasons unknown to us, sensed that cubism with its excessive planar fragmentations would lead to a flattening out of the space available to painting. What was at question here was the role of volume and the nature of pictorial representationalism. The critical part is played by the human figure. In cubism the figure had been gradually dissolved by structural analysis. But the dissolution of the human figure was not the only loss. The emphasis on structural analysis and planar representation began to dissolve the space around the human figure as well as the figure itself. Picasso would have had examples of this erosion of pictorial space close by if he cared to look. Kandinsky and Malevitch would have provided very clear evidence.

Kandinsky took the landscape, or better, our sense of the space around real things, what we might call our sense of the natural atmosphere, and dissolved it into pigmented gesture, what we now call "pure painting". The fruit of this act of liberation gave us the first really great abstract paintings. They had openness, freedom, spontaneity, clarity, purity, and just about anything else that the modern visual sensibility prizes. But for Picasso, a man whose visual sensibility surely was equal to the thrust of modernism, there was the danger here of materiality.