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The success of Picasso's painting from 1920 on comes from the unabashed rendering of volume. This is what has proven to be the most difficult thing for abstraction to deal with. What Picasso left behind, cubism, the structural fragmentation of solid figures, has been duck soup for abstraction. It seems easier to take things apart than it is to keep them together. The real problem is that abstraction cannot have rendering. It must be literal. For example, the employment of the simple device of shading a surface to give the illusion of roundness or depth seems to be an anathema to the modern visual sensibility. It just never looks right. On the other hand, abstraction must have a viable sense and expression of volume. Without it, the space that is available to abstraction is simply too closed, too dull, too unimaginative.

The kicker here is that the last really vibrant and exciting pictorial space was the cubist space that Picasso left behind in 1920. What abstract painting has to do is take what Picasso left behind, cubism, and develop it with that Picasso went on to: volumetric dynamism. This is to say that abstraction must go on with what painting has always had - line, plane, and volume - the basic ingredients. The problem is that in the 20th century, modernist or advanced painting has not yet been able to put all three together. This does not mean that its accomplishments are diminished, it means only that there is plenty of room for development and improvement. Abstraction must find a more robust and fruitful way to deal with the space around line and plane (i.e. exterior volume). It must also find some more convincing way to deal with the space that line and plane can actually describe (i.e. interior mass).