From Ruler to Tape: Stops and Starts in the History of Painted Abstraction (original) (raw)

This essay discusses the development of abstract painting in the twentieth century through the lens of artistic process. Before the invention of pressure-sensitive tape in the United States in the 1930s, abstract painters were limited to creating the straight edges of geometric forms by either applying paint freehand or by using tools such as straightedges and ruling pens. But whether abstract artists embraced the use of such aids, which resulted in a more industrial aesthetic, depended initially on whether they considered their artworks agents of spiritual cognition, as Wassily Kandinsky did, or agents of social transformation, as Aleksandr Rodchenko maintained. After tape became more widely available in the late 1940s, Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman incorporated it into their respective repertoires. While Mondrian never used tape for painting his bands, Newman developed such a mastery of applications that he effectively voided the dichotomy of earlier ideological debates. The essay also addresses technical issues in the work of Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Harry Holtzman, Burgoyne Diller, Mark Rothko, Bridget Riley, Jo Baer, Agnes Martin, and Richard Lin.