It is telling that Ivan Kafka chose to reproduce Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, ca. 1455, on the announcement for his exhibition “Rej (Whirling Rage) 1339–1995.” Uccello’s slanting, slashing swords and spears were a marvelous formal means of achieving flatness, while creating a shallow depth through the relationship between the diagonals and the picture’s framing edge—a Renaissance equivalent of Cubist space. In a gesture that recapitulates one of the primary tendencies of Modernist practice, Kafka makes explicitly literal what was implicit in the work of the Florentine Master.

Kafka’s