Pictures in Search of a Subject.

The article discusses how the step-by-step march toward abstraction is used to approach issues related to pictorial subjects in painting. It says that the pull of the unconscious is fruitful only when the subconscious is filled with the raw material of art, which artists believe is everything. The author adds that young and middle-aged painters who have absorbed the important lessons of modernism are forced to work out a dialogue between the concrete and the abstract. The threat of relapse into the mindless repetition of standard forms is also discussed.