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-9- has to say is clearly about abstract, not representational pictorial composition. [underlined] The fullness of forms in Ambiguite, the sense that each planar shape wants to push itself out into a solid form (say from a circle or a square into a sphere or a cube), is much like what happens in Mondrian and later Hans Hoffman - something which Kandinsky might have gotten from worrying about Mondrian and which Hoffman probably picked up from Kandinsky [end underline]. This fullness of form comes from the blocking up of a gridded or ruled picture surface. This may seem to be a strange way of looking at modernist painting, but if we think about it for a minute, abstract painting doesn't really begin with an empty canvas. It always brings along a set of spatial co-ordinates to organize its first encounter with the picture surface. Seen in this way flatness is never a given, only an unrealizable goal. Consequently [underlined] the perception that abstraction should be seeking a fullness of form within the context of its own development becomes easier to accept [end underline]. It is easy to see this emergent blockiness, this desire for density assert itself in the pigmented rectangles of Mondrian and Hans Hoffman. With a little effort we can see this same effect in Kandinsky's Ambiguite. The deep outlining in Kandinsky suggests that the whole pictorial cake has been divided at one stroke into all of its pieces. [underlined] What's noteworthy in Ambiguite is that the outward edges of the figurative elements have an extra deep, wide negative enframement which allows us to reach in with our fingers and lift out the complex and simple pieces [end underline] of this ambiguous cake. We have the sense that we can lift out Kandinsky's elements the way we can grasp Mondrian's spanning grids and, to a lesser extent, Hoffman's slabs, although with Hoffman the slabs are sometimes more like