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these effects to appreciate the elevation of art, the suspension of abstract figuration in its own proper pictorial space, an indeterminate, drifting space, antagonistic to boundaries. Here Pollock's recognition of the flexibility of pictorial space fulfilled Kandinsky's dream. He avoided the call to flatness.

It is easier to argue that Pollock realized Kandinsky's ambitions for abstraction than it is to suggest that Kandinsky had a premonition of Pollock's struggles. However, in Kandinsky's [underline] Ambiguite, complex et simple,[/underline] a good case can be made to support this latter supposition. This painting is ambiguous, complex and simple just as its title announces. It is ambiguous because in terms of direction and purpose it appears to question Kandinsky's own basic tenet that painting should be free, that [underline] painting is an effort to realize amorphous images in a concrete way, to render visualization pictorial, to wrench pictorial space from literal space without resorting to either illustration (representational illusionism) or material presentation (pigment as sculpture).[/underline] It is complex because the painting inevitably contains many disparate elements, not the least of which are painted memories of the past and the actual physical participating presence of the artist himself. It is simple because its goal is simplification - to overcome all of the ingredients of experience which go into making painting, while in the process managing to project itself as a present, undeniable pictorial expression - itself and nothing else.

In all these ways Ambiguite makes itself a deceptively ordinary looking painting much the same as Pollock's [underline] The Deep, 1953.[/underline] In