Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965)

Painted in 1930, Georges Vantongerloo's picture Composition émanante de l'équation y=-ax2+bx+18 avec accord de orangé, vert, violet perfectly demonstrates both his similarity to, and distance from, the tenets of De Stijl. Vantongerloo was a Belgian artist who, during the course of the last decade and a bit, had increasingly explored abstract, geometric forms in his paintings and sculptures. The crisp, quasi-scientific appearance of this Composition reveal the idea that science and rational thought have provided stepping stones for his aesthetic, while also echoing the composition of his friend and fellow painter Piet Mondrian's works.

In terms of both the dimensions and of his palette, this picture reveals the different thinking that underpinned Vantongerloo's work. Rather than limit himself to the prime colours, black and white, as had Mondrian, Vantongerloo selected the colours of the visual spectrum. Vantongerloo, having been influenced by the concepts of flux and of atomic structure that had played such a part in scientific thought in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, believed that his compositions presented reorganisations of reality, rather than inventions of a new reality: in this composition, he is reconfiguring the building blocks of the way in which we see the world. In both its concept and its composition, then, this painting illustrates his own statement that, 'I have no scientific knowledge. Only my wonder stimulates my curiosity' (Vantongerloo, quoted in G. Brett, 'A Longing for Infinity', pp. 16-39, Brett (ed.), Georges Vantongerloo: A Longing for Infinity, exh. cat., Madrid, 2010, p. 30).

The relationship between this picture and Vantongerloo's sculptures, which presented cuboid forms in three dimensions, again reconfiguring the substance of reality, is evident when comparing Composition with, say, his 1921 Construction of Volume Relations in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Like this Composition, that work was formerly in the collection of Silvia Pizitz, an eminent collector who acquired works by many of the artists associated with the Abstraction-Création group of which Vantongerloo was the first vice-president and which also featured among its number Josef Albers, Hans Arp, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Sophie Tauber-Arp. Pizitz, the daughter of the owner of a group of department stores primarily based in Birmingham, Alabama, managed to accumulate a significant collection which itself was the subject of a 1979 exhibition; she was also instrumental in founding New York University's own art collection, generously gifting works to it from soon after its inception.