#de-stijl

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.

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.

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.

Mondrian, from what I've read, believed grids like this could help build a calmer, more honest world after the first World War — a strict visual language everyone could read the same way.

I couldn't dig up much on this specific one — Mondrian made dozens of these grid paintings in the early 1920s, and I can't find what set this particular one apart from the rest.

According to what I've read, around this time Mondrian narrowed his palette down to red, yellow, blue, black, white and grey and nothing else, chasing the De Stijl idea that a painting could be stripped to its barest elements and still hold together. This is one of the grid paintings people mean when they say 'Neoplasticism.'