ion into afunctioning three-dimensional form. Gropius Bauhaus buildingscelebrated the industrial materials and construction techniquesand banished ornament and hand-crafted elements in favor of sleekform. A number of abstract artists found photography as the mostprogressive means of expression. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarianartist produced photograms-photographs created without a cameraby arranging objects directly on light sensitive paper, which isthen exposed to light in bursts or for sustained periods. Hecreated the impression of three-dimensional form by changing thedensity of lights and darks across the major surface. As the convention of figurative painting was radicallytransformed by abstraction, so was the fundamental forms ofmusic. In 1920s Arnold Schoenberg developed the twelve-tonesystem- a method of composition with twelve tones related onlyto one another in a way that all the melodic and harmonicelements of a composition are derived from a basic arrangement asordered by the composer. A composition can be made by inverting,reversing the rows or doing both at once. All tones must be usedbefore any is repeated. This method provided composers with asurprising degree of freedom within its orderly framework. In early abstraction, the relationship between poets andvisual artists was so close that many of them worked in bothforms of communication. Among better known was Italian FuturistFilippo Tommaso Marinate, as he created a poetic form calledparole. Marionette poems were of dissonant compositions withnonsense words in various typefaces and sizes roaming freely onthe page, producing a chaotic pattern of forms. He distorted,stretched and fragmented words, so that they lost all connectionto their original meaning. He hoped that the pure force of thewords given visual expression would result in a more primitiveand original form of communication. The theater had offered painters, writers and musicians auniqu...
