Get the latest tech news

Cracking the Mondrian Code (2017)

When the artist Piet Mondrian died in the winter of 1944 at the age of 71, he was in the midst of working on a painting he had told people would be the definitive expression of his aesthetic ideals.

That wonderfully evocative phrase, “Last Great Unfinished Masterpiece” brings to mind symphonies, cathedrals, and other projects of vast ambition that exceed the bounds of a single individual’s natural life: the splintered spires of Antoni Gaudí’s sandcastle-like Sagrada Família cathedral in Barcelona, only fifteen percent complete when its architect was killed in a trolley accident; Alban Berg’s 20th century operatic masterpiece, “Lulu,” whose third act wasn’t completed until fifty years after his death; Mozart dictating his final deathbed phrases of his “Requiem” to his rival, Salieri (courtesy the imagination of Milos Foreman). Since World War II artists have “courted the unfinished with pronounced enthusiasm, seeking bolder, ever more novel, and experimental ways to not finish works of art,” writes Kelly Baum in an essay in the exhibition catalog. Georges Vantongerloo, a Belgian painter and sculptor who was also a founding member of the De Stijl movement, in 1922 and 1923 took measurements of Mondrian’s paintings and made equations based on certain calculations, ultimately producing hundreds of pages of data to explain or describe how the images came to be.

Get the Android app