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The danger that the new open atmospheric space of abstraction would be clogged up and weighed down by the mass of its only ingredient, pigment. This is the articulation of the fear that abstraction, instead of giving us pure painting would merely give us pure paint, something that we could find on store shelves as readily as on museum walls.

If Kandinsky was filling up the landscape with pigment, Malevitch was doing even greater damage to the figure inhabiting that landscape. First he flattened it like a pancake ane then with incredible dispatch he obliterated it. His method was simple substitution. He replaced the complex spatial coordinates of the himan figure with a modest planar configuration. White on white, Malevitch's abstract masterpiece, the touchstone of modernist flatness, is still the solitary figure framed by a landscape, albeit clothed in pigment and severely compressed. This painting (Olga called it a portrait of an Eskimo in a snowstorm) is probably what Picasso feared most - a painting with nothing but inert pigment and condensed pictorial space. In short, painting with nothing to work with, and no space to work in.

Now by suggesting that Malevitch's White on White was basically as much a figure in a landscape as it was a white rectangle askew on a slightly larger rectangle of almost the same color, and by insisting that Picasso's turning away from the abstract implications of cubism to the volumetric realism of the classical figure paintings was [[strikethrough]] critical [[/strikethrough]] CRUCIAL event, I know that I am pushing at best a highly idiosyncratic view of what's been what. But even if my emphasis and some of my examples have