Abstracts

The preceding word is, in one sense, a misnomer since what it introduces is not an abstract but (meant to be) sensibly representational. The word ‘abstract’ originates in the metaphor abs traho (‘I withdraw from’), and abstract artworks do withdraw, from the rhetoric of persuasion and the implied servitude of illustration. It is a deep refusal to participate in the vocabulary or gesture of dominance and oppression, a refusal even inadvertently to propagandize. In that sense, Lear’s abstractions are as modern as those of Kandinsky or Joan Mitchell. Beauty (not erotic but aesthetic, even when representational) has always been abstract. And the themeless limericks that follow, which represent the small percentage of Lear’s limericks that are abstract, have significant form, which tends to be analogical, but pointlessly so, as demonstrated not in the ‘Lady of Norway’ but in each of the ‘Man of the hill’, the ‘Lady of Poole’, the ‘Man of Nepal’, and the ‘Man with an owl’.