4/14/2024 0 Comments Types of drawing grids![]() ![]() The grid as a “factual display” is very much to the point, as is the notion of it being a potential attribute of the module. ![]() It is not, that is to say, an underlying composition, but a factual display. This organization does not function as the invisible servicing of the work of art, but it is the visible skin. The field and the module (with its serial potential as an extendable grid) have in common a level of organization that precludes breaking the system. These, however, also return us to Cubism by way of Mondrian and, in so doing, locate the late ’40s fusion of Cubism and Impressionism that still directs the course of American art. A mediator in this respect is Philip Guston-at the time of his “plus-and-minus” type paintings. For it is the reduplicative surface that matters here far more than the mere fact of rectilinearity. This allover expansiveness comes most evidently by way of Pollock, to whom those that do use the grid as a primary (structural) device are more often indebted than to such late Cubists as Ad Reinhardt. The grid is used to decentralize the picture surface: to create an integral surface of closely similar elements so repeating themselves as to produce a uniform textural block. Moreover, many current grid paintings are quasi-Impressionist. For example, Sol LeWitt’s gridded wall drawings are really a kind of updated Pointillism-they create a regularized vibrancy of sensation due to their small “crosshatched” scale. And yet, the grid, as currently used, owes as much to Impressionist sources as to Cubist ones. ![]() Impressionism, however, narrowing or, at times, suppressing values, turned painting into an affair of surfaces to which linear figuration as such was subsumed. When Cubism exaggerated contrasts of light and dark it maximized the skeletal aspects of traditional painting and made drawing a central issue for those who followed its lead. Of course, much 20th-century art demands attention in more or less Florentine terms, and does so because of the enormous significance of Cubism. To assume that a linear surface organization when visible in a work of art is its structure is to follow in part the Florentine precept that aspects other than drawing are somehow accessory to the work’s substance. Grids can constitute structures or can, more often, be simply frameworks. One is tempted to talk here of grid structures but if the word “structures” is to have any precise definition we must distinguish it from things that are more properly frameworks. GRIDS, WITH MODULES AND SERIES, have become important modes of organization for recent art. ![]()
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