#abstraction

He turned a square canvas onto its corner to hang like a diamond — not a one-off trick, he kept coming back to the format for years.

This one's built from strips of coloured tape rather than paint, and it was never finished. A curator worked out a few years back that it's likely been hanging upside down since the 1940s — and from what I've read they're leaving it that way, because the tape has gone so fragile that turning it now could take the whole thing apart.

Apparently this is one of the paintings people point to when they talk about cubism pushing all the way toward abstraction — there's barely anything left that reads as a literal scene. It's tied to a procession he remembered from Spain, but almost none of that original imagery survived into what's on the canvas.

By 1913 Kandinsky had mostly let go of recognizable scenes, chasing what he called the "inner sound" of color instead.

He'd not long landed in New York when he made this, and it's said he was mad about boogie-woogie records and dancing — the title's the music, not just the street. Supposedly the little coloured blocks are the city seen from above, all traffic and lights, though I couldn't find him ever spelling that out himself.

According to Wikipedia she was one of a small wave of Norwegian women who moved to Paris in the twenties to study with Léger, and this comes from right in the middle of that stretch. Apparently she drifted back to more ordinary landscapes later on.

This was the last of his ten numbered 'Compositions' — the works he considered his most important, apart from the smaller 'Improvisations' he made along the way. He mostly avoided black in his own paintings, since he linked it with endings, so it's a little strange that's the color he chose to close the series on.

This was painted not long after he started teaching at the Bauhaus, and it's often pointed to as the moment his early, looser abstraction gave way to these harder, more measured shapes he'd keep using for years after.

This isn't painted at all — it's ceramic tile, fired in pieces and fixed to the front, which is how it's survived decades outdoors. I couldn't find out who decided the building needed one.

This is one of Mondrian's diamond-shaped 'lozenge' canvases — apparently he kept returning to the format through the late twenties and thirties, paring the paintings down until almost nothing was left on them. Naming it after a dance feels almost like a joke next to how little is actually happening on the canvas.

From what I can find, he limited himself to one shape here on purpose, just to see what color and scale alone could do without any other form to lean on. He apparently believed the circle was the most spiritual shape a painter could use.

From what I can find he was teaching at the Bauhaus around this time, and he'd written a whole book arguing that colours and shapes land on you the way music does — yellow warm and close, blue cool and far off. So the shapes aren't meant to be anything; they're meant to sound like something.

They say he kept a handwritten catalogue of every single thing he made, numbering each one as it left the easel — the pencilled line along the bottom edge is his own filing, not a museum label.

She died young, in 1924, not long after she'd started moving from paintings like this one into textile and stage design.

Malevich showed these without frames and wouldn't say which way up they went — he thought a fixed top and bottom was just another assumption people had gotten used to calling natural.

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.

He called this series 'Proun' — supposedly short for a phrase meaning something like 'project for affirming the new.' From what I've read it was his attempt at a kind of painting that wasn't quite painting or architecture, more a rough sketch for spaces that didn't exist yet.

He made the same reclining shape over and over for something like fifty years. Apparently they were cast in editions too, so this isn't the only one of it — versions of the same thing sit in a few different countries.

The title points at Mount Parnassus, where the Muses were supposed to live, and it's also the name of an old set of music exercises — he played violin seriously, so people reckon both were on his mind. It's said to be one of the biggest canvases he ever did.

Wikipedia puts him with a group of Munich painters who reckoned a picture could work the way music does — colour doing the carrying, the scene barely hanging on. Apparently this comes from the stretch of years when the nameable things were on their way out of his pictures for good. Not long after, there was nothing left in them to point at.