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8

same message reiterated by Jackson Pollock. Listen to the "Frogman" of 1952, or follow "Search" or "Scent" of 1955.

It was realism, hammering home the lessons of the past, driving the concerns of volume, mass, and three-dimensional rendering relentlessly forward, that denied abstraction the promises of its future. A future, that cubism seemed to overwhelmingly assure, sank under the weight of Picasso's retrenchment. The huge stone feet of the classical seashore bathers, sinking in the sand, should have crushed their way through the paintings' ground plane, and the mass of the figures themselves should have forced out all the pictorial space. These paintings should have failed. Realism should have gone bust with this effort and, if it hadn't been for Picasso's genius, it would have. Can we imagine a credible surrealism without Picasso's bathers and bulls propping it up from behind?

If realistic figuration had failed after cubism, it would have left the way open for Mondrian's extension of cubism toward abstraction. But unfortunately, Mondrian's effort to make do with the more abstract, basically descriptive, elements of art-making had to contend with the flamboyant success of surrealism. Still he drove on. Mondrian tried to make paintings with line and plane alone. He tried to make paintings with the descriptive elements of volume, the elements which defined its boundaries, without ever depicting the figure, that is, of volume itself. This was a search for reality without substance. The search for a visual world charged with enough energy so that mass would not be missed, so charged, in fact, that the mere depiction of mass would appear to be an awful and inappropriate intrusion. In short, this was a search for a world in which figuration, human or abstract, would not be necessary.