Let's make up a movement; let's call it Purism, at least for the duration of this paragraph. It is white and it is serial--just like Meier's poem or Brancusi's plaster column. Nothing against color; nothing against single, unrepetitive shapes. It's just that these two elements have, by general agreement, become aesthetic touchstones, keys to the kingdom of modern aesthetics; our own versions of the pale plaster walls and plain stone arches of a Michelozzo monastery. Where life calls forth, as it always has, simplicity shaped by pallor and immaculate proportion, the answer over centuries has remained remarkably the same. It's a though each new generation must conserve, in its own way, some reductive and essential grail handed down by its predecessors. The redux of purity; Modernism does it particularly well.
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