Hughes asks, "how can you make paintings that

Hughes asks, "how can you make paintings that might reflect the immense

shifts in the consciousness that this altering technological landscape

implied?" What is abstraction?

Cubism does not present a coherent "way of life" as an impressionist painting might. Little to do with nature, most are still lifes in which man-made objects

predominate over natural ones like fruit or flowers. Cubism does not "woo the eye or senses." (Boorstin)The notion that perspective is not a

concrete thing, that the looker affects the act of looking, that the eye and its objects inhabit the same plane, the same field and influence one

another was a patently 20th century notion. Paul Cezanne labored to give this idea aesthetic form in his painting. Most important is his exploration of the

relativity of seeing, "coupled with an equally vast doubt that he or anyone else could approximate it in paint." His paintings are about relativity. He treats

shadows as shapes in their own right...harmony in form and color. "The idea that doubt could be viewed as heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as

that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age is one of the keys to our century, a touchstone of modernity