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| Sonia Delaunay Triptych 1963 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Robert Motherwell Open No. 122 in Scarlet and Blue 1969 acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Jules Olitski Instant Loveland 1968 acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Hermann Nitsch Poured Painting 1963 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
from Encantadas
"Does enchantment pour . . . ?" No. It does
Nothing, it is as it is as you see it. Fog
Lying low in the valleys,
Bright lights high in the surrounding hills
Shine out with suspicious glow,
Illusory stars that vibrate
Just in the eye, provoked by layers of gas.
The isles leap on the map,
Ash and ash and ash, castle
And plain. Eyes make magic, make what you see
In the seeing – adagio
Or as ash.
– Peter Straub (1971)
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| John Hoyland 11.7.64 1964 acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Ben Nicholson 1969 (Carnac No. 1) 1969 oil paint on board Tate Gallery |
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| Bridget Riley Hesitate 1964 emulsion on board Tate Gallery |
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| Morris Louis VAV 1960 acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Thomas Monnington Square Design 1966 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
from Canto XVI
Then light, air, under saplings,
the blue banded lake under æther,
an oasis, the stones, the calm field,
the grass quiet,
and passing the tree of the bough
the gray stone posts,
and the stair of gray stone,
the passage clean-squared in granite:
descending,
and I through this, and into the earth,
patet terra,
entered the quiet air
the new sky,
the light as after a sun-set,
and by their fountains, the heroes,
Sigismundo, and Malatesta Novello,
and founders, gazing at the mounts of their cities.
– Ezra Pound (1925)
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| Marc Vaux D1.6 1961 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Larry Zox Orange Time 1965 acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Victor Vasarely Banya 1964 gouache on hardboard Tate Gallery |
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| Ellsworth Kelly Red White 1966 acrylic paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Wendy Pasmore Oval Motif in Grey and Ochre 1961 oil paint on plywood Tate Gallery |
"Even non-objective art derives some of its meaning and effects from the habits and mental sets we acquired in learning to read representations. Indeed, we have seen that any three-dimensional shape on the canvas would be illegible or, which is the same, infinitely ambiguous without some assumptions of probabilities that we must bring to it and test against it. The painter who wants to wean us from these assumptions has perhaps only one way open to him. He must try to prevent us from interpreting his marks on the canvas as representations of any kind by compelling us to switch over to that alternative which we have observed in the interpretation of drawings; he must make us read his brushmarks as traces of his gestures and actions. This, I take it, is what the 'action painter' aims at. He wants to achieve an identification of the beholder with his Platonic frenzy of creation, or rather with his creation of a Platonic frenzy. It is quite consistent that these painters must counteract all semblance of familiar objects or even of patterns in space. But few of them appear to realize that they can drive into the desired identification only those who know how to apply the various traditional consistency tests and thereby discover the absence of any meaning except the highly ambiguous meaning of traces. If this game has a function in our society, it may be that it helps us to 'humanize' the intricate and ugly shapes with which industrial civilization surrounds us. We even learn to see twisted wires or complex machinery as the product of human action. We are trained in a new visual classification. The deserts of city and factory are turned into tanglewoods."
"Strictly speaking, writes Professor Edwin Boring, the concept of illusion has no place in psychology because no experience actually copies reality."
– from Art and Illusion: a study in the psychology of pictorial representation by E.H. Gombrich (London: Phaidon Press, 1960 – an expanded version of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1956)