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Showing posts with label Paul Strand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Strand. Show all posts

Friday, 17 January 2014

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

Thursday, 18 July 2013

Only the middling sort

“Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence"
G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, October 10, 1908


Paul Strand - Wall Street - 1915 


Livio Vacchini - Palestra Gymanisum - 1995/7


Micahel Levin - New Concrete - 2009


“Extremely happy men and extremely unhappy men are equally disposed to harshness: witness monks and conquerors. Only the middling sort, and the mixture of good fortune with bad, offer gentleness and pity.” 
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk VI, Ch IX