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The easel painting, the movable picture hung on a wall is a unique product of the West, with no real counterpart elsewhere. Its form is determined by its social function, which is precisely to hang on a wall. To appreciate the uniqueness of the easel picture, we have only to compare its modes of unity with those of the Persian miniature or the Chinese hanging painting, neither of which matches it in independence of the requirements of decoration. The evolution of modernist painting, beginning with Manet, is constituted in good part by the evolution toward such compromise. Monet, Pissarro and Sisley, the orthodox impressionists, attached the essential principles of the easel painting through the consistency with which they applied divided colours and every part was treated with the same kind and emphasis of touch. Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Matisse went on reducing the fictive depth of painting, but none of them, not even Bonnard, attempted anything quite so radical than later did Monet. Twenty years after Monet’s death, his practice became the point of departure for a new tendency in painting. Though the “all-over” picture will, when successful, still hang dramatically on a wall, it comes very close to decoration – to the kind seen in wallpaper patterns that can be repeated indefinitely and the “all- over” picture remains an easel picture. Mondrian’s attack on the easel picture was radical and his paintings are among the flattest of all easel pictures. All-over “polyphonic” painting, with its lack of explicit oppositions, is perhaps anticipated by Mondrian, but in this sense it is also anticipated by Picasso’s and Braque’s anticipated Cubism. From Giotto to Courbet, the painter's first task had been to hallow out an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface. With the arrival of out rightly abstract art, it seemed that the picture was deprived of real space and real objects as a model for its own articulation and unity; that henceforth the norms of the medium alone would have to suffice. Pictural space lost its "inside" and become all "outside". Not only does the abstract picture seems to offer a narrower, more physical and less imaginative kind of experience than the illusionist picture, but it appears to do without the nouns and transitive verbs, as it were, of the language of painting. But space which joins instead of separating also means space as a total object, and it is this total object that the abstract painting, with its more or less impermeable surface portrays. The picture plane as a whole imitates visual experience as a whole; rather the picture plane as a total object represents space as a total object. Art and nature confirm one another as before. The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility. The connoisseurs of the future may be more sensitive to the imaginative dimensions and overtones of the literal, and find in the concreteness of colour and shape relations more "human interest" than in the extra- pictorial references of old time illusionist art.