Theo van Doesburg

He obviously tilted these on purpose — turning the square to a diamond was meant to clash with the flat walls and floors of whatever room it ended up in.

Apparently this is one of a series where van Doesburg took a nude model and kept flattening her into blocks and lines, step by step, until almost nothing human was left — part of what pushed him toward the grid paintings De Stijl is known for.

Before he helped start De Stijl, van Doesburg apparently spent a stretch working through Cubism, breaking a room and a figure down into flat, overlapping planes like this one. It's one of the pieces people use to trace how he got from drawing people to painting nothing but lines and blocks.