Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating can be written as the triad’s unstable middle term: the work in which the logic of descent and repetition is no longer secured by the visibly descending nude, but begins to migrate into a looser and more elusive arrangement of forms. If Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) makes motion legible through serial figure fragments, Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating can be framed as a further stage in abstraction, where coordination replaces depiction as the dominant operation.
This gives the work a pivotal role in the group. Rather than simply repeat the earlier painting’s achievement, it complicates it by pulling apart the relationship between body, movement, and structure. The emphasis shifts from a recognizable figure in transit to a more ambiguous field in which forms seem selected, grouped, and coordinated according to an inner logic. That ambiguity is precisely what makes the work important: it suggests that the earlier problem of motion has become a broader problem of organization.
Within The Core Triad, Tulip Hysteria Co-ordinating functions as the transitional and mediating work. It carries forward the serial logic introduced by Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), but transforms it into a less literal and more conceptual system. It is the point at which descent becomes coordination and the triad turns from figure into structure.