Viewing page 63 of 82

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

4

to the space around itself, that has become so hard to replace. Spatial inertness has become a true concern for abstraction     . Excessive materiality and abundant flatness threaten to give us a very stagnant pictorial space.

Contrapposto (hip up, shoulder down) and foreshortening (big feet, obscuring a little head) are tried conventions which show us how the human figure has helped articulate pictorial space in 
ways abstraction now finds hard to simulate. The dictionary defines contrapposto as a representation of the human body in which the forms are organized on a varying or curving axis to provide an asymmetrical balance to the figure. The other technique from the past, foreshortening, reduces or distorts the human form in order to convey the illusion of three-dimensional space. What the human figure has done with these devices has been to create a dramatic and diverse pictorial space with abstract figuration has been jard pressed to match. This is not to say that
abstraction hasn't tried. Kandinsky and Hans Hoffman, for 
example, made every effort to articulate their brushstrokes and knifed masses of pigment with some of the flair and attack that these devices from the past imply, but still they haven't been able to make us forget the lush and rich mannerist space of yesteryear. The advance beyond easel painting, with its emphasis on flatness and its glorification of the mechanics of paint manipulation, still has a way to go to catch up to the pictorial dynamism of the past.

[[margin left of line 13]] F shortening was plotted to fit Figure in space, NCT v- [[?]] ?