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Tuesday 14 August 2012

Where form can be formless

"To us today there is no doubt that Greek artis an insistence that the sense of exaltation is to be found in perfect form, that exaltation is the same as ideal sensibility, in contrast, for examle, with the Gothic or Baroque, in which the sublime consists of a desire to destroy form, where form can be formless."
Barnett Newman, The Sublime is Now, 1948



Gustave Courbet - Bord de mer à Palavas - 1868

Barnett Newmann - Untitled (Stations of the Cross) - 1946 (?) sideways

Yuu Sakai - Untitled (via Minimal Exposition)

Erik Bulatov - Horizon - 1971/72 (via artdaily)

"A culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the protospirituality of 
ever-childish humanity and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal 
thing from the boundless and enduring."
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918