kind of rigor, by an all too indiscriminate neglect of the agitation within our own, Impressionist heritage-its impatience and its nevertheless al
ready achieved loosening of formal totality, its at any rate already avail
able even if often inferior and still reflexive, inexpressive subjectivation of the image of the world. Modernity's paths, the irreversible eruption of its mystical nominalism, have to be followed through to the end, or Egypt, or perhaps the equally obsolete coherence of the historical as opposed to the aprioristic Gothic, will again be enthroned.
For there is one thing that separates us from it, powerfully and pre
cisely. We have become more individual, searching, homeless; we are formed more
flowingly,
the self of us all rises up close by. Thus the lifeblood of the new artistic statements springs much less than before from the medium's sources, from the formal energy. Form is no longer the only means one requires to speak, to draw attention; in fact, it is no longer even a means that one especially needs.
Thus even
c% r,
painting's proper ambition-to!create with color, transpose into color, model through color-has retracted somewhat.Certainly one would like to see clearly, and, if possible, airlessly. Still, that is not decisive, since Kokoschka paints with gray, brown, dark violet, and every other earth tone. And when Marc and Kandinsky take up purer colors, the latter indeed aiming at a theory of color harmony, and if in general the fashion is to revel in clear, skinless local colors instead of an atmospheric blur, then here one is no longer taking pleasure in color as such; rather, it is the capacity for excitement for whose sake here only the purest, crassest luminosity is selected and assembled. It is that peculiar emotional value accruing as much to the individual colors as to their composition: hate, fervor, anger, love, mystery, in order that the entire aura in which this psychological landscape lies can be rendered. Thus Daubler can say of such colors: "Thrusts of intense yellow reach into blue inevitabilities."4 That is the power of color, and at the same time the limit of its appointment, for here color must serve as never before. Color can be broken any number of times in its own pleasure, its own formal en
ergy, and the purely painterly, which many Impressionists are vaguely proud of having rediscovered, retreats before the drive toward expression.
On the other hand
drawing
certainly drives us powerfully forward again as well. No more visual devotion to inferior, cursory impressions. And it cannot be denied that this is more than just a consolidation, that since Man�es, thinking in terms of drawing, the new being-thought-of in termsThe Production of the Ornament
of surfaces, seems to strive even more deeply. What is being sought is not line in itself, any more than color in itself, unless the line does not smoothly outline, and is dense, and expressively compacted. As when in Rousseau or Kandinsky trembling or riding appears as a short, striking curve, or the desire for revenge as a jagged, arrow-shaped formation, or benevolence as a blossoming flower. The outline sharpens and charges to the same degree in Archipenko or in Boccioni's striding statue as Daubler translated it into words, that is, no longer the person at rest, who inciden
tally can stride forth, but striding as such, which dominates the body, takes shape as corporeality: "The ankles want to break out, the soles drag space behind them, the breasts symbolize microcosmic man slipping him
self between the constellations, in our heads we roll an entire world through our orbits: an overabundance is man, but by our movements we break continuously into animated geometries, on our shoulders and shanks we convey as yet unexpressed crystallizations of space into the rhythm of our stride." Beyond this logic, a planar logic, this new being
thought-of in terms of cubes and curves also seems to tend most immedi
ately deeper mimetically, and Cubism is the consistent expression of this new, new-old spatial magic. It began by simply disassembling things, fold
ing their unseen surfaces into the visual plane. Thus an early painting by Picasso still bears the telltale title: "Dismantled Violin": but soon such games, such experiments became actual experience; the strange charm of
fered by the divided plane, such as one can sense in site plans and archi
tectural blueprints, became apparent. The appeal of the active, mysterious partitioning, the way the weights are equilibrated as on a scale, and the bare, active creature of line itself; the deliberate volition to reinstate, even against the slightly subdued surface arabesque, the awareness of mass, vol
ume, and weight, the awareness of that secret gravitation, order and stat
ics that regulates space as an assemblage of quadratic and cubic equilibra
tions. Still other, more fruitful possibilities appear-far from mere func
tional form, from engineering, or from the ultimate false reminder of the Egyptian hall of the dead-and directs us upward: not only Man�es, not only Cezanne in his famous dictum about sphere, cone and cylinder in the constnlction of form, already suggest artists who think in spatial terms; in
deed even the Sistine Madonna-who seems surrounded by distantly sounding spatial relationships, along with so to speak heavenly spatialities that are partly conveyed to us-leads something of a Cubistic life within space, as Paul Fechter boldly and rightly pointed out. And certainly it is
not simply effective placement that makes something Cubist, since every image from the past, and especially from absolute epochs of style, could then be represented as Cubist; rather, it is the remarkably heterogeneous Raphael who clarifies this issue far more than the otherwise so much more significant Leonardo. Now things do not merely exist in space, but space exists within things, and space can certainly build a foundation without equal, as in the Roman Pantheon or even in Gothic cathedrals.
But of course much else lags behind, and besides,
drawing
must still bebroken.
Drawing can and must reinforce, so that the fugitive aspect of a great feeling, going beyond the gaze to resound far and wide, will have a physical support. It can also signify a lower objective determination, like any other meaningful formalization. But all too often something, already obvious has quadratically moved in, walled itself up, and obstructed its banal world with boxes, chests and cubes from which little can be unpacked, no matter how deeply they seem to pile up. Moreover, while Kokoschka or Picasso break through the earlier faith!in mere color, the Futurist movement, with its addiction to ecstasy, dynamism, and all
pervading contemporaneity, and, particularly in the Cubist work, dis
turbs the circles of a vacuous or sterile structuration.5 Movement, but even more: the most unexpected allegorical meaning rises up within drawing, within line, and, as the strongest reaction against every kind of painting seeming to rest within itself, seems mimetic in itself, against every "absolute" painting, reduces even Cubist or any other useful statu
ary to a mediating, stabilizing formula, or at best to a form of lower ob
jective determinacy in the series of Expressionist self-shapings, self-pro
jections. In addition, if one otherwise has the impression that certain fa
miliar remnants, an eye, a violin's tuning peg, or even just a numeral, have been caught so to speak against their will in the Cubist painting, then Braque, Derain, and other, younger painters from the Picasso school are just the ones to show that one wants to encounter these objective al
lusions throughout all Cubism's misdirections, that is, not only at the be
ginning, as the final witnesses of an emotional goodbye to the world, not only in artwork's subject, but precisely in its most abstract predicate: so that these peculiar images can be comprehended as the most tortuous auxiliary constructions, whose concentrated abstraction will in turn re
solve itself into a newly achieved objective corrrelation and objective sym
bolism. So if one should want to make a more deeply mimetic form out of such painting inward, painting into the spatial stillness, which the