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5

Now, one last run through. Consider the human form - skin, bone, and flesh. Consider the poor painting - surface, structure, and pigment. The first gives us the ingredients of human figuration, the second gives us the ingredients of abstract figuration. Blended together, these ingredients have yielded great painting. The question is can we get along with half of the recipe? The skin, bones, and flesh that we have given up stand for a lot in terms of pictorial power.

The volumetric and spatial contortions that the human figure is capable of articulating in painting are really wonderful. And the range of tactile, painterly sensations that it can carry is also very great. These things are not easy for abstract figuration to replace or to supplant. Abstraction suffers greatly from a diagrammatic, brittle quality. Its links are often stiff and arthritic. Its as though we can feel the pain in the welded joints of abstract sculpture when images of Rodin's flowing, erotic marble limbs drift through our memory. The past may make us think ahead, but it can't make us think ahead without fear.

Sex is no joke. When Picasso left the arid desert of cubism behind, he never looked back. The women of the 20's and 30's, awash in painterly volumetric rendering, left planar analysis and its future of flatness standing on the beach. It's very hard for abstraction or abstract figuration to be sexy, and if it's not sexy, it's not art, everyone knows that.