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PARTISAN REVIEW
sent a similar progression within the limits of their own careers. I
at least know of no one who did not begin in the conventional
manner (the first or second wine-glass) followed by many years
of exploration among other methods of rendering nature before
the final stage was approached. And it should be emphasized that
the abstract painters today owe more to Seurat, Cezanne, and par–
ticularly the cubists than to the original initiators of abstraction.
The work of the pioneers in the abstract (1911-Kandinsky,
Delaunay, Kupka) was disordered and chaotic. The new world
was still without the internal scaffolding such as a strong tradition
required. This the cubists supplied, although they themselves
clung to their objects and continued by a different path.
I must here insert that I make no pretense at speaking inclu–
sively; and furthermore that I am aware that different painters–
in abstraction as in any other category-approach their metier
from opposing standpoints and are impelled by quite different
motives. I shall from here on concentrate on my own approach to
picture-construction because I can be sure only of what I do myself
(and that not always); from conversations I have found that it is
to a certain extent typical. It is doubtful that any two artists fol–
low quite the same procedure, or even that one artist proceeds in
quite the same way in any two pictures. Rules seem to be restric–
tions that no branch of art is capable of surviving for long.
The painter of naturalistic subjects, no matter how tightly
the overtones may be laced into the structure, starts with his sub–
ject; he has decided before he begins that his picture will repre–
sent a nude, a street-scene, or what-not. In other words he is about
to fill a (usually) rectilinear surface with shapes whose juxtaposi–
tion is to a considerable extent predetermined by their functions
.as picturesque embellishments. The abstract artist also starts with
a rectangle* which he is resolved upon filling with shapes (if he is
Mondrian or Greene he might call it dividing into spaces). But in
the new conception each shape is determined by its structural and
expressive purpose. Therefore it is not with any pictorial sug–
gestiveness that the abstract artist starts, but with shapes or forces
*There is of course no reason why paintings
should
be rectangular and they are
not always so. It is merely the easiest space to control as well as the most practical
to stretch and frame. Early Renaissance paintings are frequently irregular (sometimes
in the shape of a cross), Braque has done beautiful elliptical pictures, and some of
Shaw's most successful works are his abstract "plastic polygons."
