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With the return of abstract painting to the forefront of much contemporary practice, many key tropes of 20th-century modernism have come back into circulation--with the difference, however, that abstraction and figuration no longer stand opposed as they once did. What histories of abstraction are unlocked by contemporary abstract painting? Does the resurgence of the body in contemporary abstract painting conform to the rule of "semiocapitalism" as Isabelle Graw and others have recently argued, or to some other logic? To find answers for these questions, I look back to the origins of modernist abstraction in the work of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, circa 1911-13, when the opposition of body and grid was still held together by a third term: the face.

Daniel Marcus is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at UC Berkeley. He has written on the motif of the face in the art of Jean Dubuffet, Cathy Wilkes, and Josh Smith.

Marcus will discuss how abstraction is rooted in the tropes of modernism by examining the work of Robert and Sonia Delaunay.

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