Novaković, M., Between Impure and Pure, AM Journal, No. 25, 2021, 173−183.

doi: 10.25038/am.v0i25.456

Milovan Novaković
Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia

Between Impure and Pure:

The Sketch for a History of Blotch

Abstract: Throughout the history of Western painting the blotch often exposed its capacity
to operate in seemingly opposite directions, to be simultaneously engaged in engendering
material impurity and optical purity. While in earlier instances it mostly obtruded on the pic-
ture’s integrity, with the rise of non-mimetic painting blotch became the main vehicle of purity
and cohesion. However, its unstable and versatile nature is revealed in a vetero-testamentary
passage, where the purity or impurity of blotch is measured according to whether it invades
the whole or just a part of the infected surface. In this brief sketch, the bipolarity of painterly
macchia is described by pointing to its predominantly blemishing function from the Renais-
sance to 18th century; to growing acceptance of its material and formless impurity, and its
consequent purification during the formation of pictorial formalism; and finally, to its revived
uncleanness in the artistic interventions of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. The survey
ends with the conclusion that the being of blotch resides in its itinerant, ever-shifting character,
and that our experience of it as pure or impure depends on its quantity and pervasiveness.

Keywords: blotch; tzaraath; macchia; tache; pictorial impurity/purity; materiality/opticality;

formalism; all-over painting.

But if the blotch [tzaraath] breaks out in the skin, so that it covers all the
skin of the blotched person from head to foot, so far as the priest can see,
then the priest shall make an examination, and if the blotch has covered
all his body, he shall pronounce him clean of the blotchiness; since it has
all turned white, he is clean. (Leviticus, 13: 12–13)1

This short declaration from The Third Book of Moses seems to strikingly sum-
marize a curious and paradoxical play between purity and impurity: a play that brought

1
Usually construed as “leprosy” or “decease”, tzaarath is here generically translated as blotch. The rationale for
this decision is to be found in that this phenomenon invades clothes and walls as well as human skin. Since ety-
mologically it fuses blot and patch, blotch could equally refer to visual and immoral implications of the Hebrew
word. The quote from Bible is consequently modified.
Author contact information: [email protected]
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forth, in the art of painting, an astonishing history of blotch. Describing tzaraath as a

symptom of sinful decease, remediable by the process of ritual ablution, The Old Tes-
tament reveals the fundamental antagonism of dirty and clean, permissible and for-
bidden, moral and immoral, spiritual and corporeal. The point is quite simple: if the
immaculate dermal surface was corrupted and infected by a patch, for restoring the
shine of its purity the problematic patch has to vanish. It turns out, however, that the
purifying process is not necessary if the blotch has taken the entire surface, whereby
the covered area becomes optically homogenous, consistent, and clear.
Since a picture primarily consists of active surface–mark relationships, it could
be said that the Levitical paradox is especially transposable into the pictorial domain.
Moreover, the history of painting could be described – at least generally and from the
standpoint of the formal pictorial constitution – as a variation of degree in the balance
between normative uniformity of painted surface and formlessness of the pictorial
mark, between transcendentality of representation and material immanence of blotch.
In short, paintings could be graded in terms of the amount of their blotchiness, that
is, according to their proximity either to the purity–pole or impurity–pole. And while
in its earlier manifestations blotch mostly operated as a befoulment of the visual in-
tegrity of the pictorial surface, with the growing accent on factural autonomy it para-
doxically became the essential condition of optical integration and formal purity. Due
to the increasing affirmative appreciation of manual strokes and marks, its original
blotching function – which in painting from Renaissance to Romanticism more or
less have to been suppressed – was converted into the purifying function, thus be-
coming a condition of pictorial cleanness. After the whole pictorial plane in the 19th
century became a configuration of blotches, once mandatory disinfection ritual – i.e.,
subduing of the visual and material presence of blotch – was no longer needed. As a
further matter, becoming a dominant element in picture-making, in what comes to
be called pictorial formalism it will take the exclusive role of purification, while all
that has deviated from blotch would be considered to cause disorder and disrupt the
consistency of overall painterly maculation.
Hence it can be argued that the gradual transition of painting from mimetic,
imitative mode to factural, non-mimetic mode – a standard line of reasoning in for-
malist art history – is deeply marked by the efficiency of blotch. The macular logic,
however, does not strictly follow this linear development which would imply straight
progressive conversion from pure to impure. Instead, thanks to its protean nature,
blotch often finds itself halfway between clean and unclean, manifesting its itinerant
character and power to act in seemingly opposite directions.
It is well-known that for the illustration of a narrative [historia] Renaissance
painters sought to attain as much clear and lifelike representation as possible, striving
to camouflage support’s opacity and with their composing skills keep hidden rough
and tangible material: in short, to create a uniformity which could give the picture re-
quired smoothness and make it a flawless optical continuum. To keep safe the mimet-
ic character of the image, it was desirable to avoid any kind of material, optical, and

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physical disturbance of its visual unity. But even then materiality of the painterly mark
was dually read: either as something foul, or something that could serve the purpose
of the composition. While Leonardo had a pareidolic proclivity in “walls soiled with
a variety of stains” to recognize shapes and increase his imagination and invention,
Botticelli encouraged coherence and perfect execution, certainly sharing the more
prevalent opinion that “such study was of no use because by merely throwing a sponge
soaked in a variety of colours at a wall there would be left on the wall a stain in which
could be seen a beautiful landscape.”2 There was, however, an unanimity on this point:
to compose in forma di una macchia is permitted only in sketches and preparatory
works, while finished artworks must be sine macula. Nevertheless, just a few decades
later the underlying material substance began slowly to emerge on the surface of
finished works, while sketchiness, accentuated brushstrokes, rough execution, were
starting to be appreciated as a personal stamp of the artist. Vasari thus writes that
Giorgione smeared [macchiarle] paint on support without preparatory drawings and
that Titian worked with “bold, broadly executed strokes and blotches [macchie].”3 Yet
besides being a sign of artist’s singular style, his maniera, theoretical discourses treat-
ed macchia, the blotch, as a bipolar and bidirectional phenomenon: one which, if seen
up close, reveals its intrinsic materiality and disturbs the representational transpar-
ency and compactness; but which also endows composition, when it is viewed from
afar, with a peculiar liveliness and vivacity. Topos concerning the invitation to look
at pictures from distance, inaugurated in literature by Horace4, reveals that blotch can
be subjected to the representation and deprived of its soiling, blemishing, and con-
spicuous nature just if the spectator stands at a proper distance. Yet more frequent in
the Kunstliteratur are assertions, mutually opposed, concerning either impure effects
of blotch or its contribution to purity and vividness of the image. Vasari thus criticized
Andrea Schiavone for presenting “macchie or sketches without being finished at all”,
while Giovanni Battista Armenini blames in his precepts the growing group of paint-
ers who dare to exhibit half-finished, “scarcely dabbed [macchiate]” pictures.5 The dic-
tionary definition of blotch as a “sign that liquids leave and the mess on the surface
that they touch”6 had never been dismissed from mind, although macchia became an
inevitable theoretical and practical motif: actually, the worry of its contaminating
and unsettling effect continued to haunt plenty of artists and scholars. While he wel-
comed both the smooth and rough working manner, Carel von Mader still advised
avoiding too strong and overemphasized hues, as well as any kind of accentuations
2
Martin Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Art, trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), 201, 222.
3
Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori. Tomo VII (Firenze: G. C. Sansoni, 1881),
427, 452.
4
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 181–203.
5
Philip Sohm, “Maniera and the Absent Hand: Avoiding the Etymology of Style,” RES: Anthropology and Aes-
thetics No. 36 (Autumn 1999), 123.
6
Ibid., 120.

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and protrusions.7 Similarly, Samuel van Hoogstraten noted that “there are some who
claim to be masters of the art even though their nudes seem to be flayed or smeared
with red paint or the juice of berries”, while for formless color elements Jose Garcia
Hidalgo wrote that “without good contours true to the original, and well-placed darks
and lights, they are only blotches of good color and are of interest only to those who
are ignorant and lack understanding of art.”8 With more loose and thick applying of
pigments, the reactions took rather biblical overtones, pointing to an almost sacrile-
gious, sinful, fecal nature of blotch: with Rembrandt’s viscous impasto in mind, Ge-
rard de Lairesse warned younger artists to not let their paint “flowing down over the
piece like feces [drek]”, and not to work “through daubing [kladder].”9 Yet no one was
as explicit as Jean-Étienne Liotard, who in the mid-eighteenth century challenged
even the widespread view that accentuated brushstrokes and stains disappear if the
composition is seen from a distance, saying that smears in sloppily executed paintings
invariably stick out. For him, tache is the Levitical disease, a real physical lesion, a
wound inflicted on a painted figure’s body or whole picture’s skin:

The more perceptible a touch is, the harsher it becomes, and the more it
will shock the sharp eye of anyone filled with the true beauties of nature
[…] A touch on carnations, having no relation to the real colour of the
object it represents, is like a burn mark, a cut or a scar. A face, or any
figure, painted with an excess of touches, resembles the ugliest or most
defective parts of nature.10

Instances of interpreting strokes and blotches as incidents in composition

were copious and appeared with no less intensity even in more recent times when
the painting was primarily defined as a group of material marks arranged on a flat
surface. Severe attacks on impressionist pictures convincingly demonstrate that the
hostility was proportional to the quantity and prominence of their smudges. Even
more astute critics and later defenders of this kind of painting were at first assured that
Impressionists’ pictures are made up of “flickering strokes, light spots unreasonably
scattered”, and that “stains [taches] come to obfuscate and obliterate everything”.11
Certainly, even apologists of the late-Renaissance  pittura di macchia  seemed
to feel a slight fear of too conspicuous, bulgy flecks, as any brushstroke at some point
could be metamorphosed into a sore: tzaraath. That they insist marks and blots must
be consolidated into a flawless and polished image, holding that the picture should
7
Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 196.
8
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 277, 287.
9
Nicola Suthor, Rembrandt’s Roughness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 93.
10
Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory 1648–1815, 674, 676.
11
Georges-Charles Huysmans and Gustave Geffroy as cited in Oscar Reutersvärd, “The Accentuated Brush
Stroke of the Impressionists: The Debate concerning Decomposition in Impressionism,” The Journal of Aesthet-
ics and Art Criticism 10, 3 (March 1952), 273.

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be preferably observed from a distance, confirms their view that basic mimetic or-
der still must be preserved; in fact, blotch could be beneficial only as a contributory
element to the overall picture’s effect. Perhaps the first who unequivocally elevated
Venetian colorito – i.e., working alla prima and in bold strokes – was Marco Boschini,
who claimed macchie to be what makes the painting pure. Fervently advocating paint-
ing in blots, he points not only to the dual nature of macchia but anticipates the later
formalist rhetoric of purity where pure and autonomous color patches will become
favored plastic elements. Boschini puns on macchia, claiming that in its macular and
mudding nature, paradoxically, lies its inherent purity. “Oh stains [machie] without
a blemish [machia], even splendors that brighten as if they were light”, he states and
adds, “Whoever shrinks from machia will soil his colors and stain [machia] them…”12
Indeed, the gradual adoption of blotch as the principal plastic element will
guide its further passage from a polluting role to purifying one. During this process
whereby painting would steadily gain its factural autonomy, the cliché that in our
perception all blotches are materially subdued and optically merged into a represen-
tation – will still abide. Whether the fleck is a product of bold brushstrokes or is a
salient color area, artists believed employment of middle hues and even distribution
of blots could secure a chromatic and optical integration. The whole discourse on
‘broken colors’ was concerned with the problem of how to obtain compactness from
which no element could protrude.13 Du Fresnoy thus instructed painters to never lose
from sight that most prevailing hue should be evenly dispersed throughout the pic-
ture, regardless of painting manner, “for a single colour will make a spot or blot.”14 In
a sense, this method of uniform and harmonious chromatic or tonal distribution will
be used in pictures of all sorts, even radically modern ones. In the same way will be
embraced the cliché that paintings need to be observed from a distance, as Courbet’s
knife-applied paint, impressionist blurry facture, Seurat’s speckles, facets of analytical
cubism only from distance could be shaped into more or less comprehensible and
recognizable images.
Although nonimmune to this old cliché, Alexander Cozens was daring enough
to devote himself to careful investigation of blot, at the same time when Liotard re-
coiled from this dishonorable taint of painting. Fearlessly leaving on paper various
inkblots, he would discern in arrangements of black and white patches, in shapes
“rude and unmeaning”15, rudimentary traits of a landscape. Cozens is aware, and for
that reason resorts to the blot method, that

If a finished drawing be gradually removed from the eye, its smaller parts
will be less and less expressive; and when they are wholly undistinguished,

12
Sohm, “Maniera and the Absent Hand: Avoiding the Etymology of Style,” 123–4.
13
For a genealogy of ‘broken color’ see Ulrike Kern, “The Origins of Broken Colours,” Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 79 (2016), 183–211.
14
Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy, The Art of Painting, trans. William Mason (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 103.
15
Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory 1648–1815, 851.

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and the largest parts alone remain visible, the drawing will then repre-
sent a blot, with the appearance of some degree of keeping.16

From this insight, Cozens drew an inference that if it is to be observed from a distance
the blotted composition must indicate some general relationships and rhythms which
should be optically blended into a pleasant, vivid image. He was the first to assign blot,
albeit still in the domain of its mimetic efficiency, an unequivocally positive role. This
affirmation of patches, as well as the notion that “an assemblage of accidental shapes”17
generates the most striking images, will shape the later impressionist view that a spec-
tacle is above all disposition of blotches. The belief that the eye perceives nature as a
multitude of atomic color sensations was also prepared by the observations of John
Ruskin, who wrote that the external world appears to us as “an arrangement of patches
of different colours variously shaded”, that “we see nothing but flat colours”, and that
the whole power of painting lies in “a kind of childish perception of these flat spots of
color, simply as such, without an awareness what they signify.”18 In the same scientific
manner, Hippolyte Taine claimed that colorist painters rely on the precognitive per-
ception of reality as a constellation of colored blotches:

In this state, which is that of the person born blind immediately after the
operation, the eye has the sensation only of variously colored patches
more or less clear or obscure [...] Painters in color are well aware of this
state [...] their art consists in seeing their model as a patch [tache].19

The most literal affirmation of blotch in art literature of that time undoubted-
ly comes from the pen of Vittorio Imbriani, an Italian critic who situated “the soul
of painting” in the first impression we receive before a picture: in “the macchia, the
mark or stain”20. With a slight irony, Imbriani gives rather unexpected examples to
describe the sum and substance of painting, such as the beauty of blotches created
by “splashes of wine, sauce, or coffee which spill upon the tablecloth”21. “If in an ink
spot”, he writes, “in a squashed fly, there can be a painting – in a rudimentary state,
of course – this means that the essence, the constitutive element of a painting is not
the expression of the figures, nor the perspective, nor the composition of the groups,
nor any other of the incidental elements on which people habitually place too much
16
Idem.
17
Idem.
18
John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing (New York: Dover, 1971), 27–8. While he considered that good paint-
ing inevitably contains a certain amount of visual ambiguity, thus repudiating precise Düreresque contouring,
Ruskin also rejected paintings made of muddy and blurry blots, pejoratively calling them Blottesque.
19
Hippolyte Taine, On Intelligence. Vol. II, trans. T. D. Haye (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1875),
69–70.
20
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 542.
21
Ibid., 542–43.

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importance.”22 He theoretically outlines what many painters from Macchiaiolism and

Impressionism to the present day have demonstrated in their practice: the “formless
harmony of colours”23, the interplay between daubs and patches, is ultimate and pure
pictorial syntax.
The realization that the human eye primarily sees reality as a flat arrangement
of blotches, as well as increasing awareness that the picture is the surface made opaque
through accumulation and organization of painted mass, led to the theoretical foun-
dation of the so-called formalist painting. Throughout the modern period one can
follow the line of pictorial practice that is more and more anxious to get rid of super-
fluous or extraneous elements and meanings – of perspective, illusionism, figuration,
narration, etc. – and reduce itself to a flat arrangement of pure plastic elements. In
this purist system, which culminates with the doctrine of Clement Greenberg, each
painter brings his distinctive way of direct handling of material, a singular manner of
color organization, a novel utilization of the medium. The pure is the painting that
entertains only its syntactic elements – color, shape, surface, facture, etc. – striving to
arrive at the specific condition which demarcates painting from other activities and
domains, namely: flatness.24 The task of painting, as stated by this doctrine, is to assert
its inherent flatness, creating through various arrangements of color patches, strokes,
areas a consistent optical coalescence whereby underlying material conditions and
causes could be sublimated. Yet “a welter of blurs, blotches, and scrawls”25 to become
an optically unified whole, it is necessary to disseminate them on the surface in all
directions and all parts, to apply them all-over, so as they can seize and activate the
entire available space. This scheme certainly brings us back to the Levitical paradox
which epigraphs this essay: by invading the whole picture plane, infecting its dermal
body, blotches unexpectedly turn the messy support into a homogenous, pure optical
image. The work of Jackson Pollock is the most appropriate and obvious instance
where the bipolar nature of blotch is unfolded, simultaneously expressing its power to
be materially impure and optically pure. His swirls and twists of paint create in a be-
holder’s eye, exposed to this all-pervading macular chaos, the impression of an optical
order, an almost uniform and flawless state of blotchiness. The modern, pollockian
reformulation of the mutable tzaraath could probably read like this: “If we had a thor-
oughly chance world with items arranged randomly throughout the field, the results
22
Ibid., 543.
23
Idem.
24
Even though his arguments were largely based on the contrast between the purity of painting as a medium
and the impurity of everything that diverges from malerisch, Greenberg often repudiated accusations for purist
dogmatism, underlining that his intention was not to establish a law but simply to describe the situation. For
him “purity” in Western art “has been a useful idea and ideal, with a kind of logic to it that has worked, and
still works, to generate aesthetic value and maintain aesthetic standards.” In a later conversation, indirectly de-
nying his allegiance to the concept of purity, he briefly stated: “I don’t believe in impurity.” Robert C. Morgan,
ed., Clement Greenberg. Late Writings (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 69–70,
227. 
25
John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg. The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance,
1957–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 193.

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would be orderly.”26 In his essay “Impurity”, Allan Kaprow rightly argues the role of
purity and order in Pollock’s paintings is often overlooked due to their apparent mate-
rial messiness and uncleanness, and he quotes an illustrative remark by Thomas Hess
concerning their calm and pure side:

After short observation ... violence is consummated. The image reverts

to its enigmatic space on the wall, acquires a cool, almost fragile inde-
pendence ... [but the] impulse to movement returns; the vertiginous ride
always starts again.27

Kaprow observes that in Pollock’s paintings poles of purity and impurity, disorder and
order, movement and rest, are perpetually being transmuted into one another, and
that “strokes can also be applied so endlessly on a picture that they eventually become
nearly a blank surface with little perceivable motion.”28 But he also recognizes an in-
verse process in the paintings of Barnett Newman, whose plain and seemingly pure
color fields dissolve into impure chaos of sensations. Comparing two artists, Kaprow
concludes:

Pollock erupts with frenzy, only to burn into thin air. Newman begins
with the premise of a perfect vision in a calm, unruffled world and ends
with a cataclysm.29

This tendency to move from entropic to negentropic and vice versa is what
distinguishes paintings of Pollock and Newman from a vast number of non-objective
compositions where blots and patches are thoroughly subjected to the principle of
static purism, and where pictorial pureness is achieved by mere homogenization of
matière or through an organization of various flat shapes. In such conditions, whether
it is a patch or a blot, the blotch is divested of its initial uncleanness, its soiling, smear-
ing capacity. Hence it seems that to restore its defiling and maculating function it was
necessary to revive tzaraath, and that was possible only through sheer transgression,
by resorting to the sinful causes that at first, according to Leviticus, led to the blotchy
disfiguration of skin: discharging of body fluids, urinating or ejaculating.
A lesser-known work of Marcel Duchamp, Paysage fautif (1946), inspires us to
take it as a tacit response to all kinds of pittura di macchia, and perhaps more specif-
ically as an implicit criticism of what in this time comes to be known as art informel
and tachisme. On an astralon placed upon the piece of black satin, the artist spilled
blobs of his semen which were over time transformed into a picturesque blotch. This
26
Paul Grimley Kuntz, “The Art of Blotting,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25, 1 (Autumn 1966),
96.
27
Jeff Kelley, ed., Allan Kaprow. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1993), 38, 40.
28
Ibid, 41.
29
Ibid, 45.

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polluted surface, a product of Duchamp’s onanism intended as a love offering, was

baptized “Faulty Landscape”, yet this name could also mean “Indecent Landscape”,
“Improper Landscape”, and “Flawed Landscape”. By referring to this blotch as paysage,
the artist seems to indicate he was aware that landscape art in the West was mostly
identified with painting in blots and therefore considered inferior and even unworthy
of serious consideration. The fautif can also refer to the fact that viscous, liquid, shape-
less stains throughout the history of painting were seen as contaminating incidents
that destroy spotless picture surfaces. To these conjectures could be added one more:
in the time when the pure pictorial stain was conditio sine qua non of painting, Du-
champ’s seminal daub seems to point out, in his characteristically witty yet lascivious
manner, that the real criticism of the pictorial purity implies restoring of tzaraath, that
is, blotch as a sinful mark of actual sperm.
When in the 1970s Andy Warhol decided to try his hand at non-representation-
al painting, he invented a rather odd painterly procedure: on copper-coated canvases
he conducts, with the aid of assistants, micturating sessions, waiting for the etching
process to produce formless blotches, ulcers, and scabs. These chemically generated
surface lesions, according to Warhol, were the product of deliberate direction of ure-
thral jet, of controlled spattering which certainly called to mind Pollock’s pouring
of paint. Yet this body of work, Piss Paintings, he conceived not as a merely cynical
gesture or a vulgar mockery of abstract-expressionist gesturality, but as a significant
endeavor to make an innovation in the ever-changing painting medium. Thus rather
than drawing too obvious conclusions that with urine splotches Warhol wanted to
refer to Pollock’s drips, or allude to the rumor that he used to relieve oneself on his
canvases, or that he emulates the disheartened pisser-painter from Pier Paolo Pasoli-
ni’s Theorem (1968),30 we are more inclined to see these paintings as one of the latest
examples in recent art to reveal the blotch both as impure and pure. Using the gush of
urine as a painting method, Warhol implicitly tried to bring back to blotch the status
it had enjoyed before purist formalism disinfected and made it smooth. During the
period when every painterly blotch shines with inviolable purity, the only way to draw
attention to it is to make explicit its impure, excretal being. Yet, on the other hand, the
artist also recognized a holy purity in the uncanny and all-over smeariness of these
paintings, comparing them to acheiropoieta, venerating icons not-made-by-hand and
Myrrh-flowing, well-known for their healing, purifying powers. As he explained:

When I showed them in Paris, the hot lights made them melt again; its
very weird when they drip down. They looked like real drippy paintings;
they never stopped dripping because the lights were so hot. Then you can
understand why those holy pictures cry all the time.31

30
Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Pissing Figures 1280–2014, trans. Jeff Nagy (New York: David Zwirner Books,
2017), 99–109.
31
Ibid, 107.

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Indeed, pure blotches in these pictures were not created manually, but by the
urinary stream and through the process of chemical oxidation. They burst on the
picture surface as if support is infected by some inexplicable or supernatural force
rather than by human deed. Yet while they are not made by hand, and while the urine
lachrymation bathes the skin of paintings and makes it evenly pure, their accompany-
ing stench and sores reveal that in body’s secretions lurks a maleficent, spoiling, even
necrotic impurity, leaving on innocent and immaculate surfaces ulcers and scabs,
blotches and flecks, macchie and tzaraath.
Perhaps the history of blotch in painting is nothing but a vivid chronicle of its
incessant swinging between impurity and purity, its alteration from maculate to im-
maculate, its passage from material immanence to optical transcendence. For in this
ambiguous interstice, betwixt and between, takes place its unpredictable, sometimes
dichotomous, yet always duplicitous play. Oh MACHIE, che xe tante stele PURE!32

References

Du Fresnoy, Charles Alphonse. The Art of Painting. Translated by William Mason. New York: Arno Press,
1969.

Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Harrison, Charles, Wood, Paul, Gaiger, Jason, eds. Art in Theory 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000.

Harrison, Charles, Wood, Paul, Gaiger, Jason, eds. Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998.

Kelley, Jeff, ed. Allan Kaprow. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1993.

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Article received: April 25, 2021

Article accepted: June 21, 2021
Original scholarly paper

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