#geometry

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

According to Wikipedia, this hung in his own dining room for years before his wife gave it to a museum after his death.

I tried to look him up and got almost nothing — no dates, barely a paragraph anywhere. Whoever he was, this seems to be one of the few things of his that made it into a collection at all. If anyone knows the story, I'd genuinely love to hear it.

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.'

I looked him up and it's grim: he ran with the Russian avant-garde crowd, and in 1938 he was arrested and shot in Stalin's purges. His wife, a painter herself, apparently kept his canvases hidden for decades afterwards.