MODERNIST FORM GIVERS

A couple of pages ago, we established that the basic goal of modernism is to reveal the unseen.  We know that the 20th C modernists rejected the mimetic representational renaissance picture plane construct.  Crucially, they were not interested in the “realistic” depiction of three dimensional space.  Yet they could have been fantastic modernist form givers.

The question that I keep coming back to is, why were these fantastically creative people content to manipulate the space of the picture plane?  To ask this another way, why did they not operate transparently?  Wouldn’t it have been more interesting if, say, de Kooning had depicted transparent three dimensional forms?  Would it have been far fetched for de Kooning to be a form giver, rather than simply a shape giver?

Wouldn’t it have been amazing if the great modernist painters threw off, as part of their normal working interest, three dimensional forms?

They rejected the silly space representation that started with Alberti.  Well and good.  But why be satisfied with simply figure ground relationships on a flat surface?  If you really want to reject representation, then why didn’t they want to find a way to do that and still depict forms?

While they were rejecting representation, they were still using resolved, three dimensional forms as the basis for their work.  De Kooning used women.  Picasso used guitars.  Etc.  Transparency would have allowed them to do it all;  reject representation and yet maintain the resolved form.

It seems to me that the depiction of three dimensional forms is of a higher order than figure ground arrangement.  If these modernist greats had done this, think of the rich forms they would have given us.  If they had, we architects would look to the form legacy of the great modernist artists, rather than other architects.