Untitled

'Of course, there are basic correspondences [with the art of the past] in so far as the plastic arts are plastic - that is to say, concerned with the manipulation of form and colour. In this sense, art has always been abstract and symbolic, appealing to human sensibility by its organization of visual and tactile sensations. But the vital difference consists in whether the artist in order to agitate the human sensibility proceeds from perception to representation; or whether he [sic] proceeds from perception to imagination, breaking down the perceptual images in order to re-combine them in a non-representational (rational or conceptual) structure. This conceptual structure must still appeal to human sensibility, but the assumption is that it does this more directly, more intensely, and more profoundly in this new way than if burdened with an irrelevant representational function. On one side of this watershed in the history of art it may be argued that since natural forms realized in conventional space reinforce the artist's appeal to human sensibility; on the other side it may be argued that since natural forms introduce a criterion of accurate presentation that is subject to an intellectual judgment, the spectator is likely to be affected more powerfully through images that can be freely organized to appeal directly to human sensibility.'

Sir Herbert Read. A Concise History of Modern Painting. London: Thames and Hudson, 1959.