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| Distinctive
Traits of the Second Avant-Grade Movement
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In
the early days -between 1945 and 1955- abstract painting
was considered very much to the most distinctive sign of
the avant-grade movement. This was true to the extent that
everybody, the real avant-garde painters and others,
fought for abstract art by doing all within their power to
earn for it a natural position in the avant-grade
movement.
Abstract
painting was no more than a method: A way of overcoming
the exigencies of representation and of finding out how to
express reality, while remaining as far away from it as
possible. To aim at the abstract for its own sake was
equivalent to forcing a negative to be positive, because
the abstract, understood as the negation of
representation, could only be negative. The vast majority
of the more rhetorical avant-grade painters joined the
avant-garde movement for the sake of abstract art and
remained there, painting in the abstract, limited to their
world of simple representative negation.
On
the other hand, the remaining avant-garde painters,
although they had entered the movement through the door of
abstract painting, moved on to express a reality, which
was synthetic and significant, even if it was by no means
representative. The former were engaged in trying to
affirm a negation, thus denying their own art any
opportunity of bearing fruit. The latter, by looking
synthetically for the expression of reality, refused to
accept the negation and proceeded to give their own
painting a definitive, affirmative character of its own.
Furthermore, since art never moves in the direction of
what it negates, but rather in that of what it affirms,
those, who adopted an affirmative attitude to their
painting, even though they may not have been particularly
aware of it at the time, traced the path of this avant-grade
movement.
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