It often seems that the course of serious art should
	be explained not as a sequence of stylistic changes,
	but as a line of ruptures triggered by an urge to
	reveal and explain the structure of reality. The
	serious artist primarily wishes to show us how the
	world is, how things interlink or are related, and
	uses a particular idiom because it is the best means
	of articulating this understanding. When a major
	stylistic change occurs it is for deep philosophical
	reasons, not for trivial issues of visual appeal.
	The Renaissance idiom, for example, ran to a halt not
	because the possibilities for further formal innovation
	were exhausted, but due to the basic world view of
	Renaissance man being overtaken by the mechanistic
	outlook of the Enlightenment.A fresh conception of
	reality inevitably forces the emergence of fresh
	artistic idioms.

	We live at the probable end of a period when this
	artistic pressure to account for the structure
	of the real has been split in two. The division
	was apparently inaugurated by the failures of the
	1848 uprisings, and the escalating remoteness of
	high culture under Napoleon Ill and Bismarck. At
	that moment, a time of genesis for the rebellious
	European avant-garde, it became morally reprehensible
	for the intelligentsia to indulge in escapist fancy.
	Part of advanced Western culture entered a period
	of heightened Realism, a term then indicating not
	the degree of mimesis or illusionistic depiction,
	but the attempt to examine critically the system of
	social relations as they affected common people.
	Thus the works of the strongest pioneers of the
	age (Realists including Balzac, Courbet.Tolstoy,
	Manet, Zola, Dickens, Degas thinkers felt that
	true understanding lay not in social commentary
	or political analysis, but through Transcendentalism.
	The answers to life's dilemmas, they argued, were
	to be sought in the way that timeless, `universal'
	or spiritual truths impinged upon everyday events.
	And the innovators of this rival movement
	(Transcendentalists such as Poe, Redon, Baudelaire,
	Gauguin, Mallarme, van Gogh, Munch) attempted to
	engage with and reveal the hidden pattern of reality,
	to show an insistently unseen order.

	By the second decade of the twentieth
	century the alternate critiques of the real-
	social analysis and spiritualism-were in active
	competition. Matters came to a head in Russia,
	during those stressful, exciting, turbulent years
	that culminated in the socialist revolution. On
	the surface rival groups of vanguard artists in
	St Petersburg, and later Moscow, seemed to
	be doing much the same thing, following up
	the stylistic and conceptual implications of
	synthetic cubism in paintings, sculptures, prints
	and designs that reduced art to geometric
	fundamentals.Their art was easily identified.
	They arranged circles, rectangles and crisp
	ruled lines set mainly in black, white, grey and
	the primary colours to produce an idiom that
	seemed closer to mathematics or engineering
	than to conventional art. Their severe
	non-objective works looked similar to the
	uninitiated, yet beneath surface appearances
	there were crucial differences in motivations
	and intentions. To one side were artists who
	called themselves Suprematists, to the other,
	the Constructivists, both groups encapsulating
	rival ideologies. Originating in the transcen-
	dental idiom, Subrematism adhered to a high
	favoured non-art and industrial-grade media,
	aimed to hone a prosaic, socially critical
	imagery to liberate the masses. Elevating use
	value over aesthetic considerations, the artists
	moved into the fields of industrial and graphic
	design to become engineers of the future: the
	work of art was both a plan for, and a tool to
	help build a better world. Of course, over the
	months there were defections and shifts in
	allegiances, and some artists and writers even
	tried to place a foot in both camps. But it was
	not really possible; their outlooks and basic
	values were too different.

	By 1920 it was over. Suprematism was routed and
	Constructivism became (temporarily) the art form
	of the new social epoch. But serious geometric
	abstraction has never quite accepted the judgement
	of history. Of course, there have been formalists
	who approached non-objective art as a laboratory
	in which to refine a series of technical procedures,
	and decorators who combined colours, lines and
	shapes in appealingly aesthetic combinations.
	Yet they have represented only a sub-group of
	the broader geometric abstract movement. It
	has always been dominated by a core of true
	believers, who have continued to debate the
	relative merits of the Constructivist and
	Suprematist projects through the twentieth
	century- artists who have either aspired to
	hone a radically transforming art that prepares
	the way for a utopian epoch, or felt the
	contrary urge to devise an idiom that deals in
	unseen or higher' orders of experience.

	
       To the one side geometric abstraction promises
	harmonious order. Sometimes the composition is an
	analysis and explicit protest against the pattern
	of contemporary life: the symbolism of a dynamic
	red wedge battling authoritarian black crosses,
	bureaucratic grey rectangles or regimented white
	grids is unmistakable. But usually its clean, rational
	shapes and mathematical ratios evoke a well-organised,
	utopian world cleansed of disruption, ugliness and
	misery. Non-objective geometry so often strives to
	evoke a program or plan that will resolve social
	problems and place civilisation on more just and
	ethical lines. At the other side, geometric art
	has long been associated by both Western and
	Non-Western artists with a Platonic view of the
	world. From those Mediaeval Irish Christians
	illuminating he Book of KeIls to their Himalayan
	contemporaries working upon Buddhist sand paintings,
	and from Piero della Francesca to Roger Kemp,
	the circle and square have afforded artists the
	inexhaustible possibility of depicting the universe
	as a cosmos, an integrated and holistic system.
	o wonder we can discern allusions to traditional
	religious and mystical imagery behind more recent
	artists' iconic proportions: a prayer-like hum seems
	to emanate from their restrained ratios as if the
	compositions are the optical equivalent for
	a mantra or chant.

	Of course, these rival lineages still share a
	certainty that the non-objectivist is dealing
	with what cannot be stated in any other
	creative form.Whether participating in a social
	critique, or engaged in a quest for transcen-
	dental truths, artists turn to geometric
	abstraction because it allows them to venture
	beyond the flimsy veil of language, expressing
	what they feel cannot be written or uttered.
	And what we cannot speak about, we must
	pass over in geometric silence