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Lot Essay
‘I have no scientific knowledge. Only my wonder stimulates my curiosity’ – Georges Vantongerloo
Painted in 1939, Georges Vantongerloo’s Courbes is a lyrical example of the artist’s distinctive expansion of the ideas of the De Stijl movement. Elegant, tapering brushstrokes materialise slender curves of green and red before a clean white ground. Shifting away from the strict primary colours of his peer Piet Mondrian, Vantongerloo’s wider palette allowed him to explore the resonances and tensions between a harmonic range of different colours; during the 1930s, he had also moved beyond the straight-line geometries of his earlier works—many of them constructed according to algebraic formulae—towards a freer, more playful expression reflective of curved space, atomic energy and electromagnetic waves. These works were born of his growing fascination with cosmology and physics, which played a key part in scientific thought during the early twentieth century. Vantongerloo believed that his compositions presented reorganisations of reality, rather than inventions of a new reality: in this composition, he is reconfiguring the forces and particles that make up our visible world.
The artist had arrived in the Netherlands in 1914, a refugee from Belgium who had been injured during the opening months of the First World War. Four years later, he made contact with the artists involved in De Stijl. Approaching Theo van Doesburg with a view to publishing his essay ‘Science and Art’ in the group’s periodical, Vantongerloo quickly became absorbed into this radical group of thinkers, architects, painters and designers, marrying their groundbreaking theories and aesthetic with his personal explorations in abstraction. Particularly formative was the friendship he developed with Mondrian, whose writings on concrete art mirrored his own. While there are clear parallels between their compositions, Vantongerloo soon diverged from the older artist in his use of varied colours and forms, which vibrated through his paintings and sculptures alike. He later joined the Parisian group Cercle et Carré in 1930, and co-founded the collective Abstraction-Création in 1931; associating with contemporaries including László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, he was a true pioneer of abstract art committed to the constant evolution of his field. Vantongerloo’s ideas would come to be especially influential on the development of Neo-Concrete art in Latin America, which shared in the lively, phenomenological approach of his later works. While informed by scientific notions, Courbes sees his departure from a strict objective, rationalism towards a metaphysics of human wonder.
Painted in 1939, Georges Vantongerloo’s Courbes is a lyrical example of the artist’s distinctive expansion of the ideas of the De Stijl movement. Elegant, tapering brushstrokes materialise slender curves of green and red before a clean white ground. Shifting away from the strict primary colours of his peer Piet Mondrian, Vantongerloo’s wider palette allowed him to explore the resonances and tensions between a harmonic range of different colours; during the 1930s, he had also moved beyond the straight-line geometries of his earlier works—many of them constructed according to algebraic formulae—towards a freer, more playful expression reflective of curved space, atomic energy and electromagnetic waves. These works were born of his growing fascination with cosmology and physics, which played a key part in scientific thought during the early twentieth century. Vantongerloo believed that his compositions presented reorganisations of reality, rather than inventions of a new reality: in this composition, he is reconfiguring the forces and particles that make up our visible world.
The artist had arrived in the Netherlands in 1914, a refugee from Belgium who had been injured during the opening months of the First World War. Four years later, he made contact with the artists involved in De Stijl. Approaching Theo van Doesburg with a view to publishing his essay ‘Science and Art’ in the group’s periodical, Vantongerloo quickly became absorbed into this radical group of thinkers, architects, painters and designers, marrying their groundbreaking theories and aesthetic with his personal explorations in abstraction. Particularly formative was the friendship he developed with Mondrian, whose writings on concrete art mirrored his own. While there are clear parallels between their compositions, Vantongerloo soon diverged from the older artist in his use of varied colours and forms, which vibrated through his paintings and sculptures alike. He later joined the Parisian group Cercle et Carré in 1930, and co-founded the collective Abstraction-Création in 1931; associating with contemporaries including László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, he was a true pioneer of abstract art committed to the constant evolution of his field. Vantongerloo’s ideas would come to be especially influential on the development of Neo-Concrete art in Latin America, which shared in the lively, phenomenological approach of his later works. While informed by scientific notions, Courbes sees his departure from a strict objective, rationalism towards a metaphysics of human wonder.