TOWARDS A NEWER LAOCOON
309
or tries to remember the texture and plasticity of the clay in which
it was first worked out.
Sculpture hovers finally on the verge of "pure" architecture,
and painting, having been pushed up from fictive depths, is forced
through the surface of the canvas to emerge on the other side in the
form of paper, cloth, cement and actual objects of wood and other
materials pasted, glued or nailed to what was originally the trans·
parent picture plane, which the painter no longer dares to puncture
-or if he does, it is only to dare. Artists like Hans Arp, who begin
as painters, escape eventually from the prison of the single plane
by painting on wood or plaster and using molds or carpentry to
raise and lower planes. They go, in other words, from painting to
colored bas·relief, and finally-so far must they fly in order to
return to three-dimensionality without at the same time risking the
illusion-they become sculptors and create objects in the round,
through which they can free their feelings for movement and direc–
tion from the increasing ascetic geometry of pure painting.
(Except in the case of Arp and one or two others, the sculpture
of most of these metamorphosed painters is rather unsculptural,
stemming as it does from the discipline of painting.
It
uses color,
fragile and intricate shapes and a variety of materials. It is con–
struction, fabrication.)
The French and Spanish in Paris brought painting to the
point of the pure abstraction, but it remained, with a few excep–
tions, for the Dutch, Germans, English and Americans to realize it.
It
is in their hands that abstract purism has been consolidated into
a school, dogma and credo. By 1939 the center of abstract paint–
ing had shifted to London, while in Paris the younger generation
of French and Spanish painters had reacted against abstract purity
and turned back to a confusion of literature with painting as
extreme as any of the past. These young orthodox surrealists are
not to be identified, however, with such pseudo- or mock surrealists
of the previous generation as Mir6, Klee and Arp, whose work,
despite its apparent intention, has only contributed to the further
deployment of abstract painting pure and simple. Indeed, a good
many of the artists-if not the majority-who contributed impor–
tantly to the development of modem painting came to it with the
desire to exploit the break with imitative realism for a more pow–
erful expressiveness, but so inexorable was the logic of the develop-
