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Lot Essay
Dr. Angela Thomas Schmid has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Painted in 1936, Georges Vantongerloo's picture Fonction de lignes 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 twenty years, had increasingly explored abstract, geometric forms in his paintings and sculptures. The crisp, quasi-scientific appearance of the present work 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 size and palette, this important work on paper reveals the different thinking that underpinned Vantongerloo's work. Rather than limit himself to the prime colors and black and white, as had Mondrian, Vantongerloo selected the colors 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 reorganizations 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 work illustrates his own statement that, "I have no scientific knowledge. Only my wonder stimulates my curiosity" (quoted in G. Brett, ed., Georges Vantongerloo: A Longing for Infinity, exh. cat., Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 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 Fonction de lignes with, for example, his 1921 Construction of Volume Relations in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (fig. 1).
(fig. 1) Georges Vantongerloo, Construction of Volume Relations, 1921. Gift of Silvia Pizitz, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Painted in 1936, Georges Vantongerloo's picture Fonction de lignes 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 twenty years, had increasingly explored abstract, geometric forms in his paintings and sculptures. The crisp, quasi-scientific appearance of the present work 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 size and palette, this important work on paper reveals the different thinking that underpinned Vantongerloo's work. Rather than limit himself to the prime colors and black and white, as had Mondrian, Vantongerloo selected the colors 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 reorganizations 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 work illustrates his own statement that, "I have no scientific knowledge. Only my wonder stimulates my curiosity" (quoted in G. Brett, ed., Georges Vantongerloo: A Longing for Infinity, exh. cat., Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 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 Fonction de lignes with, for example, his 1921 Construction of Volume Relations in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (fig. 1).
(fig. 1) Georges Vantongerloo, Construction of Volume Relations, 1921. Gift of Silvia Pizitz, Museum of Modern Art, New York.