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It might be objected here that the consideration of time, the popular fourth dimension, should be taken into account by abstraction. To this we could offer some arguments, but suffice it to say that modern painting has pretty well integrated a proper sense of time into its mechanics of perception , its way of seeing things. In fact, this is the one area in which it is very superior to any form of representational painting. Realism today dies looking out the window of perspective through a viewfinder. It is the fixed focus and limited point of view that most separates realism from abstraction. The field of vision of realism is closed; the field of vision of abstraction is open.

What abstraction has done is to struggle to get by without the spatial dynamic of figuration. It has been hard-pressed to give us [[margin]]✓[[\margin]]anything like what Picasso had in the Bather with Beach Ball (1932). But abstraction has not been without resources. It has gone so far as to give us painting whose pictorial drama is provided by what is not there. Malevitch has given us two shades of white for figure and ground, and Mondrian has stretched landscape so tautly across the

painting surface that only pigmented traces of its structure remain. But brilliant as these manoeuverings has been, the chickens still come home to roost. Flatness and materiality (ie. pigmentation for its own sake) still close up pictorial space. Volume and mass, things that seem so real, and things, not so incidentally, that seem so natural to sculpture, need to be rediscovered, re-invented, or maybe even reborn for abstract figuration. This is what Picasso said when he became a post - cubist painter. Not surprisingly, thirty years later we find this