Unconditional Necessity

"Just as the desire for empathy as the basis for aesthetic experience finds satisfaction in organic beauty, so the desire for abstraction finds its beauty in the life-renouncing inorganic, in the crystalline, in a word, in all abstract regularity and necessity…

Thus all transcendental art sets out with the aim of de-organicizing the organic, i.e. of translating the mutable and conditional into values of unconditional necessity. But such a necessity man is able to feel only in the great world beyond the living, in the world of the inorganic." 

Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 1907

Paul Strand - Abstraction - Twin Lakes, Connecticut - 1916

Aleksandr Rodchenko - Steps - 1930 

Alvin Langdon Coburn - Vortograph - 1917