In 'The Rhetoric of Purity' Mark A. Cheetham explores the historical and theoretical relations between early abstract painting in Europe and the notion of purity.

List of illustrations; Introduction; Acknowledgements; Part I. Out of Plato's cave: 'abstraction' in late nineteenth-century France: 1. Gauguin and the art of pure memory; 2. Serusier and Plato's poison; Part II. The Mechanisms of Purity I: Mondrian; Part III. The Mechanisms of Purity II: Kandinsky; Part IV. Purity as Aesthetic Ideology: 1. Absolute autonomy; 2. Universal exclusivity; 3. Authoritarian freedom; Postscript. Klee and the Interrogation of Purity; Notes; Selected bibliography; Index.