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D O C U M E N T

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the abstract and the
cOncrete In MOdern art

tOmÁs malDOnaDO

No problem of painting could ever be raised without considering the
practical problem that the perception of space and time poses to every
human being. What’s more, in all epochs painting sought to be a
graphic defi nition of those two properties of objective reality.

In the past, the essence of painting’s procedure of creation lay in
establishing an aesthetic and anecdotal relation between fi gures repre-
sented in a space that was likewise represented. The idea was to make
fi gures count as forms, and that which in the canvas was absent of fi g-
ures, as ground; “empty” surfaces—those without graphic anecdotes—
were considered concrete spatial areas, veritable profundities, even
though in all actuality they were only simulacra of forms and spaces on
a two-dimensional surface. But since the beginning of the century, this
traditional view of artistic practice—one that the modern psychology of
structure might explain but that our senses do not verify—has been
subject to a radical revision. The fundamental battle that is being fought
by the genuinely revolutionary art of our time has revolved around the
concretizing of space and forms: the advancement of a new aesthetic

Originally published as Tomás Maldonado, “Lo abstracto y lo concreto en el arte moderno,” Arte
Concreto-Invención 1 (August 1946): 5–7. © Tomás Maldonado. Misspellings and alternate spell-
ings (most typically of Russian names) have been corrected throughout and adapted to current
English standards of transliteration. The fi rst names of lesser-known artists have been added.
All footnotes are the translator’s.

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00343

135

practice absolutely freed from all subjection to what is abstract and illu-
sory. It should be said, moreover, that this battle is the last step toward
the overcoming of the millenarian contradiction, within the realm of
art, between the imitative (document, symbol, sign, totem) and the
inventive (the artistic); this is because, in all actuality, the question of
space and time in painting is inseparable from and dependent on that
contradiction to which it is connected in virtue of the gnoseology
implicit in all inquiries into the represented and the concrete.

The Cubists, taking to its final conclusion what Cézanne and
Seurat had only insinuated, revealed the abstract mechanism behind
all representation. But the will to abstraction and purity—as demon-
strated by Langevin in the realm of the new atomic physics—can lead,
via a dialectical process that is perfectly explainable, to a will to objec-
tivation. In spite of its most evident characteristic—its abstract proce-
dure—Cubism was no doubt the first step in our time toward the
objectivation of painting, toward exalting its objective elements (col-
ors, forms, materials, etc.) rather than figurative fictions. Let’s not for-
get that a graphically represented apple is an abstraction of a real
apple, whether it appears in a picture by Chardin or Braque; there is,
however, an essential difference between an apple by Chardin and one
by Braque: in the case of the former, it is imitation that prevails, while
in the latter, it is invention. The preeminence that the Cubists
accorded to invention over imitation brought them into the vicinity
(only into the vicinity, it must be stressed) of the concrete. It is impor-
tant to note, however, that when the Cubists made some progress in
the direction of the concrete, the school’s original doctrine began to
wane—its fundamental principles came to be negated. In fact, the
introduction of “collage” into the Cubist practice, a genuine concrete
addition, marked the end of Cubism as such; this was similarly the
case, though from a different point of view, with the “objects with a
symbolic function,” a concrete development of Surrealism, which
years later would give an unexpected turn to the supposed oneiric
gnoseology of Breton and his friends.

The critiques raised against these abstract aspects of Cubism, as
well as the desire to overcome them, were of great importance in the
evolution of art that would follow. The Futurists rebelled against the
Cubist exaltation of the static; but since the representation of the static
is itself a mode of abstraction, these critiques indeed applied to abstract
art in general. In practical terms, however, the Futurists could only offer

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an abstract solution to the problem of movement. Instead of concretiz-
ing movement in space, they opted, once again, for representing it.

Following Cubism and Futurism—all forms of abstraction and rep-

resentation already having been exhausted—the need for concretizing
space, time, and movement became the central preoccupation of all the
painters that, from their own explorations, strove to achieve a radical
transformation of art. Thus in Russia, as a reaction against the merely
abstract experiments of Larionov, who had reduced the problem to the
imitation of luminous rays (“Rayonism,” 1910), Malevich and
Rodchenko, in 1913, endeavored to find a more subtle approach to the
objectivation of painting.1 Nonrepresentation, in a general sense, was
taken for granted; what was at issue, now, was fighting those remnants
that allowed for the fictitious appearance of things the representation of
which was not intended—things that emerged by themselves in the
eyes of the spectator. Malevich and Rodchenko realized that, in spite of
working with geometric elements, space and time continued to be rep-
resented in their canvases, as well as things of a geometric kind—decid-
edly uncommon things, but things in the end. It is precisely at this
point that the problem to which we referred above began to be posed:
SO LONG AS THERE IS A FIGURE AGAINST A GROUND,
ILLUSORILY EXHIBITED, THERE WILL BE REPRESENTATION. But,
how could this problem be solved? Malevich attempted a tonal solution:
“white on white.” Upon encountering a surface both monochromatic
and monotonal, he discovered the plane’s high aesthetic and concrete
value, thereby inaugurating the era of its exaltation. In the Netherlands,
during World War I, Mondrian, Vantongerloo, and Van Doesburg, and
later, the Soviet Gorin,2 [Marjorie Jewel] Moss, and [William] Einstein,
advocated painting “flat on the plane,” which they termed “abstract
real.” But the problem had not yet been solved; the plane’s concrete
value had only just been revealed—its aesthetic effectiveness in realms
other than the strictly two-dimensional was still to be verified.

The Russians Gabo, Pevsner, Tatlin, Miturich, the men at the
Obmokhu workshop, Medunetsky, Lissitzky, and Rodchenko himself,

Here Maldonado likely refers to Malevich’s Black Square, the earliest version of which was
arguably painted in 1913. That date, however, is quite early in Rodchenko’s career, so it is
not clear to what work or works Maldonado would be referring in this case. My thanks are
due to the editors for this observation.

2 While the artist Jean Gorin had spent some time in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, he

was actually French.

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137

having lived the great experience of the proletarian revolution, took the
first steps in that direction and formulated, around 1920, a realist-con-
structive aesthetic. “The fundamental bases of art,” said the first two of
those artists in a manifesto published in the USSR in 1920, “must rest
on a resistant ground: real life. If it wants to understand life, art must
be based on space and time.”3 The members of this school made objects
in glass, iron, steel, and other materials. They used the plane as a spa-
tial element. Nevertheless these early experiments could not yet achieve
their purported goal: time and again, the constructive realists stumbled
over the still-unsolved problem of the plane, on the one hand, and the
absence of a method for spatial composition, on the other. It was thus
necessary that both Malevich’s argument with regard to the plane and
the various searches for a truly nonrepresentational composition ful-
filled—or were aimed at fulfilling—all their stages of development and
crisis. The plane, before being thrown into any kind of spatial adven-
ture, had to progressively lose its orthogonal modality, rid itself of all
forms of stasis, and learn how to assert its value as direction—as trajec-
tory in space. Likewise, classic composition, which was eminently dis-
positional, scenographic, put to the service of the theme and its
representation, could no longer serve this new art—an art that had
nothing to arrange since its purpose was to compose: to relate aestheti-
cally, but also concretely, the pictorial elements. Before thinking of spa-
tial structures, a nonrepresentational composition in two dimensions
had to be attempted; before furthering composition, its fundamentals
had to be redefined. There was something, however, that these artists
failed to see; namely, that the problem of the objective exaltation of the
plane and that of plastic structure are inseparable. This is true to the
extent that the history of nonrepresentational two-dimensional art can
be synthetized as follows: on one side, efforts to assert the surface of the
canvas as such; on the other, efforts to achieve a nonrepresentational
structure. Thus, in 1923, the Hungarian [Lászlo] Péri, pursuing from a
nonrepresentational point of view what [Olga] Rosanova had done in
Russia as a Cubist (1916) and H. Arp and K. Schwitters in Zurich as
Dadaists, broke the picture’s traditional form, endeavoring to separate
its constitutive elements. Péri, however, did not systematize appropri-

Here Maldonado is alluding to “The Realistic Manifesto” (1920), written by Naum Gabo
with Antoine Pevsner and first published in poster form on the occasion of an exhibition in
Moscow. He seems to be quoting loosely from the extracts that were reproduced in English
in the first issue of the magazine G in 1923.

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ately this discovery, nor did he draw from it any conclusions about
structure. [Carl] Buchheister, [Henryk] Stażewski, and [Władysław]
Strzemiński tried again to exalt the plane via the tonal solution, though
less successfully than Malevich and also without touching upon the
problem of a new composition. By contrast, the Neoplasticists embarked
upon the task of achieving a nonrepresentational composition, which
they assumed to be based on the orthogonal function, and granted little
importance to the question of the plane, to which they gave a provi-
sional solution: they dissolved the “grounds” by means of linear compli-
cations until they were elevated to the same optical level as the figures
(Mondrian, Moss, Gorin, etc.). None of them, however, achieved a satis-
factory solution. Illusory space had not been abolished, and composi-
tion continued to be of a classic, dispositional kind. Neither Péri nor the
Neoplasticists dared to relativize the picture itself—to question its tradi-
tional function as a “container” (organismo continente), a surface within
which, by necessity, an event has to develop. That was their fundamen-
tal mistake.

It is at this point that the necessity of returning to the original
Constructivist proposition of an art of space as the only possible solu-
tion began to be discussed. Thus the English Ben Nicholson, in reaction
to Malevich’s “white figures on white ground,” proposed his white
forms on white ground, realizing bas-reliefs and high reliefs, while
[César] Domela, with his polychromatic reliefs, completed this return to
space. The problem of two-dimensionality thus set aside until further
notice, the path was paved for furthering the spatial formulations of the
early Constructivists. In 1920, the Constructivists had opted to favor
direction over mass in the arts of space; taking up this idea, the
Hungarian Moholy-Nagy and the Swiss Max Bill, at the Bauhaus
Dessau, studied the problems inherent to constructing directions in
space and the relations of different materials, but without paying much
attention, of course, to the problems of aesthetic structure. Indeed,
composition was not the main problem addressed by these spatial
experiments, much as it had not been in the case of their Constructivist
predecessors; given the desire to verify and discover new relations and
elements, it was logical that the problem of aesthetic arrangement was
permanently postponed.

It did not take long for these new Constructivists to realize that
dynamism is the key to achieving the concrete plenitude of space-time;
the production of objects of that kind thus emerged as their main con-

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139

cern. It is true that the brothers Gabo and Pevsner—who also took part
in this new phase of inquiry—and Rodchenko himself had already cre-
ated dynamic objects; but the restricted nature of their kinetic reper-
toires—most often circular or pendular movements—prevented those
objects from emerging as manifestations of an artistic genre at its
zenith. Aware of that, Moholy-Nagy began to construct objects based on
a broader repertoire of movements, speeds, and materials.

In all truthfulness, the incorporation of concrete dynamics into
nonrepresentational art was a most valuable conquest; but since the
problems of two-dimensional composition and their related effects on
three-dimensional composition had not been previously solved, they
began to resurface. Unexpected coincidences arose following this
merely automatic rediscovery of space.

In effect, Giacometti’s “L’Heure des traces,” one of the first
Surrealist “objects with a symbolic function,” being simultaneously
objective and dynamic, revealed the disturbing possibility that nonrepre-
sentational art could be capitalized upon by Surrealism or, even worse,
that an absurd synthesis of both could be achieved. Such a synthesis was
pursued by the American Calder—originally a noteworthy member of
“Abstraction-Création-Art non figuratif,” a united front of nonrepresenta-
tional artists (1931–1940)—whose admiration for the painter Joan Miró
led him, first, to adopt a condescending attitude toward Surrealist paint-
ing and, later, to produce works driven by a notorious expressionist-
oneiric purpose. Even so, Calder’s “mobiles” were evidently a step
toward liberating the aesthetic object from the baroquism to which it
had been brought by Moholy-Nagy in his quest to broaden and refine the
prima materia of this new artistic genre. But insofar as structure is con-
cerned, Calder repeated the nefarious mistake of failing to invent a
dynamic internal structure; instead, he subordinated his efforts to the
arrangement imposed by the engine or source of energy. It is in this
structural insufficiency—one that is fundamentally not inventive—
shared by all manifestations of nonrepresentational art that we can find
the explanation, not only for Calder’s deviations, but for all possible con-
vergences between nonrepresentational art and Surrealism and
Expressionism. It is evident that when the will to structure is relin-
quished, the field of invention is irremissibly abandoned: one enters an
uncontrolled “no man’s land” that, in the final analysis, is the land of
dreams, the subconscious, pure intuition, agoraphobia, delirious expres-
sions—of all possible varieties of illusion and representation.

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The same problems could be observed in the realm of two-dimen-

sional painting: Kandinsky and [Rudolf ] Bauer, the far right of
European nonrepresentational art, who always defended a radical skep-
ticism with regard to composition and exalted the role of intuition and
geometric automatism (“abstract expressionism”), found devotees in the
United States. The North American non-objectivists, following in the
footsteps of Kandinsky and Bauer, returned to both the picture (cuadro)
and the aesthetic anecdote. That anecdote, broadly speaking, consists of
a chromatic accent (with musical allusions), an arrow (sign), or a zigzag
(descriptive event); we are sent back to the central theme of classic com-
position. Before, it was the “Virgin of the Rocks” (Virgin, first moment
of perception—represented time); now it is Kandinsky’s “Yellow
Accent” (Yellow accent, first moment of perception—represented time).
It is precisely against all these manifestations that tend to alienate
nonrepresentational art from its true destiny—the conquest of the con-
crete—that we, the militants of Argentina’s Concretist movement,
began our work of research and invention some years ago, attempting
to solve the fundamental problems of nonrepresentational art and keep
it away from the quagmire of Expressionism, Surrealism, and all other
idealist and representational forms. Armed with dialectical material-
ism—the living philosophy of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin that vali-
dated and validates our inquiries—we succeeded in formulating a
materialist or concrete aesthetic. Our first steps were directed toward
reformulating all the problems of nonrepresentational art from
Malevich to our day, though evidently looking for more accurate and
exhaustive solutions. We understood from the outset that the major
insufficiencies of nonrepresentational art had their origins in the failure
both to achieve a new composition and abolish illusion definitively. For
this reason, we began by breaking the picture’s traditional form
(Rothfuss, Maldonado, Arden Quin, Prati, Espinosa, and later, Hlito,
Mónaco, and Souza). But we did not stop there (that was Péri’s mistake);
we tried to understand both the value and real transcendence of this
conquest. At this point we realized that the “cut-out frame,” as we came
to call it, spatialized the plane; we could not be indifferent to the fact
that we had opened the gates and that space penetrated the picture,
functioning as yet another element—an aesthetically belligerent object.
At the same time, we repeated Nicholson’s and Domela’s experiments;
we materialized figures, we turned them into forms (Maldonado, Prati,
Raúl Lozza, Antonio Caraduje). But at this point we found ourselves

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141

searching for a three-dimensional solution to the two-dimensional
problem: we were repeating the mistake. . . . So we stopped. We took
the firm stance that, if we were going to move out into space, it would
be only after coming up with a solution—never as a detour in the face
of an obstacle in the realm of the two-dimensional. We reengaged in
profundity with the problem of the “cut-out frame.” We began by grant-
ing more importance to the penetrating space than to the picture itself
(Molenberg, Raúl Lozza, Núñez). And following this route, we made the
paramount discovery of our movement: a picture whose constitutive ele-
ments are separated in space but nonetheless retain their coplanarity
(Molenberg, Raúl Lozza). In this manner, the picture as “container” was
abolished. After struggling for so many years, the concrete had been
achieved, and only from that point on could nonrepresentational com-
position become a reality—it was, indeed, already a reality.

For the first time ever, nonrepresentational art now faces the possi-

bility of addressing space and movement from an entirely concrete
perspective.

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