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Article: Contrasts of Form. (various artists, Museum of Modern Art, New York)
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- November 23, 1985
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1985 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A mathematician I once knew used to take an impish pleasure in pretending not to understand what artists meant by "geometric form." All forms, he tirelessly observed, were indifferently geometric. And he explained, with aggressive patience, the uncontested facts of analytic geometry to the sullen painers in his company. In point of pedantry, he was infuriatingly right. every point in a plane has a unique pair of real numbers as coordinates, and since every form is a locus of points, any form, however loopy to the eye, can be represented by an equation. No form, accordingly, is especially more geometric than any other so far as algebraic method is concerned. So why ...