#geometric

They say painters in this circle tightened up after the First World War — fewer overlapping shards, flatter shapes, something closer to order than the earlier, more splintered cubism. This one's from that stretch, and the checkerboard corner is one of the only clues there was ever a table under all this.

Apparently this view comes from a shot in an early experimental film Sheeler made with the photographer Paul Strand, about lower Manhattan — he was already thinking in stacked, simplified shapes before he ever touched a brush to it.

Stacked steel like this was a bit of a signature of his — there are related ones standing in a few Australian cities, from what I can find. Not much else about this particular one.

According to the museum, the painter was hurt in a gas attack at Verdun during WWI — this one's supposed to be a tribute to pilots and flying machines in general, not a portrait of any one of them.

Apparently the title's a bit of wordplay - Senecio's a plant name that also echoes the Latin word for 'old man,' which is what the face is meant to be.

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.

This is Suprematism — the idea, from what I can find, was to throw out recognizable objects and see if shape and color alone could carry a painting.

This was a cover for Wendingen, a Dutch design magazine that apparently invited a rotating cast of outside artists to design an issue. The sideways lettering was part of a bigger push at the time to make the printed type itself look modern, instead of just decorating around it.

Gris was close with Picasso in Paris and got called his disciple early on — not exactly a compliment, from what I can tell, but he'd carved out his own geometric style by the time he painted this one.

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.

He is a Spanish painter who does these rainbow-geometry giants on buildings all over the world — Marzahn got one across a whole gable end.