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painting Kandinsky mandated that the planes be self-evident and free floating. In the 1941 gouache Miro suggests something different but Kandinsky's response, which had already been set in [[underline]] Black Points, 1937 [[/underline]] ,remains unchanged. [[red underline]] He continued to believe pictorial space should make no concessions to real pictorial surfaces. [[/red underline]] However, [[^Miro remained unaffected by]] Kandinsky's beliefs [[^and]] we recognize that in the gouache of 1941 Miro had begun to treat the surface of the paper as though it were a [[^new]] page of painting, miraculously self-contained and flat. This is a foretaste of the treatment of pictorial surface which will overwhelm painting a few years later in America. No one would have difficulty anticipating Pollock's drip paintings after having considered this Miro.

It is surprising then that Pollock should have liked Kandinsky as much as he did. [[green underline]] Kandinsky's distaste for shallow space and literal surface should have put off Pollock. [[/green underline]] But as literal and direct as Pollock's painting became it seems clear that he never forgot the anti-materialist, elevated, soaring qualities with which Kandinsky had infused modernism. Pollock must have seen and remembered that access to the unencumbered, [[^unfettered]] pictorial space in Kandinsky's late paintings were gained from the empty quarter or bottom of the picture. This is an obvious corollary derived from the practice of top-weighting abstract painting. Pollock must have thought about it a lot when he lifted his paintings from the floor and tacked them on the wall. In this one simple gesture, an unavoidable return to the traditional easel view to check the paintings structural composure, the mechanical formalist core of modernism was subverted, rendered illusory. When Pollock saw the hardened skeins, suspended in a shallow pictorial space, literally anchored into their canvas surface, he ignored