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Piet Mondriaan: Compositie
'dambord' met lichte kleuren, 1919.
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The grid in early
twentieth-century art
Sophie Taeuber: Sans titre, ca. 1916-1918;
Composition verticale horizontale, ca. 1916-1918.
Jean Arp & Sophie Taeuber: Sans titre, 1918.
Jean Arp: Papiers coupés au massicot, 1918.
Arp 1886-1966. Exhibition Catalogue
Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 1986, pp. 52-55.
Vilmos Huszár: Compositie, 1918.
Sjarel Ex: "Vilmos Huszár."
In: De beginjaren van De Stijl 1917-1922. Utrecht: Reflex, 1982,
pp. 83-124.
Piet Mondriaan: Losengique met grijze lijnen,
1918; Losengique met vlakken in oker en grijs, 1919; Losengique
met kleurvlakken, 1919; Compositie 'dambord' met lichte
kleuren, 1919; Compositie 'dambord' met donkere kleuren,
1919.
Els Hoek: "Mondriaan".
In: De beginjaren van De Stijl 1917-1922. Utrecht: Reflex, 1982,
pp. 47-82.
Georges Vantongerloo: Étude, 1920.
Georges Vantongerloo 1886-1965. Exhibition
Catalogue Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels,
1981, p. 44.
"Hij zet nu met zijn Belgisch intellect
een hulpstelsel op touw dat volgens mij op de natuur gebaseerd
is. (...) Met zijn gewone bewustzijn zit hij alles uit te rekenen.
(...) Hij gaat te werk als een (gewone) theosoof." [Mondriaan
writing to Van Doesburg about Vantongerloo, September 5, 1920.]
Cf. Nicolette Gast: "Georges Vantongerloo." In: De
beginjaren van De Stijl 1917-1922. Utrecht: Reflex, 1982, pp.
233-261.
Paul Klee: Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht ..., 1918;
Alter Klang, 1925; Farbtafel auf maiorem Grau, 1930;
Individualisierte Höhenmessung der Lagen, 1930; Paneelschildering
QU I, 1930; Polyphonie, 1932.
Jürg Spiller: Paul Klee. Utrecht:
Bruna, 1962, pp. 61/83.
Norbert Lynton: Klee. London: Hamlyn, 1964.
Ellsworth Kelly: Linear Color Sequences (1952-1955)
Yve-Alain Bois: Ellsworth Kelly: The Early
Drawings, 1948-1955. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Art Museums, 1999, # 122-158, 168-177.
Ellsworth Kelly: 3 X 3 Color Grids with Borders (1953-1954)
Yve-Alain Bois: Ellsworth Kelly: The Early
Drawings, 1948-1955. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Art Museums, 1999, # 159-167.
Theory
"In the early part of this century there began to appear, first
in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that
has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition in the visual
arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently
becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces,
among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility
to literature, to narrative, to discourse."
"It is not just the sheer number of careers that have been devoted
to the exploration of the grid that is impressive, but the fact
that never could exploration have chosen less fertile ground.
As the experience of Mondrian amply demonstrates, development
is precisely what the grid resists. But no one seems to have been
deterred by that example, and modernist practice continues to
generate ever more instances of grids."
"In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the
realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural,
antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns
its back to nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates,
the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real
and replacing them with the lateral result not of imitation, but
of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship,
the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects
to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in
the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart
and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final."
". . . the bottom line of the grid is a naked and determined
materialism. But (. . .) that is not the way that artists have
ever discussed it. (. . .) Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing
canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They
are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit."
"The grid's mythic power is that it makes us able to think
we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic)
while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief
(or illusion, or fiction)."
From: Rosalind Krauss: "Grids" October 9,
Summer 1979. [Reprinted in: The Originality of the Avant-Garde
and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985,
pp. 9-22. The quotes above are from pages 9-12; Eduardo
Navas put a cut-up version of this essay online in his project
"Grids".]
"It's supposed to be indexical of all that is rational,
but I think it's as mad as many logical things turn out to be
– artificial, hysterical, subsuming its own version of chaos.
It's rigid but flexible, a measure of scale but scaleless, it's
flat with imitations of depth, democratic about space but really
absolutist, stamped with rigidity but alert with permutational
virtuosity. It's a container that contains itself, that is both
form and content."
Patrick Ireland, 1998.
The Centrifugal
Grid versus the Centripetal
Grid.
David Sylvester: "Mondrian
in London," Studio International, December 1966.
John Elderfield: "Grids," Artforum 10 (May
1972), pp. 52-59.
Rosalind Krauss: "Grids," October 9 (Summer 1979).
Tony Smith: Mondrian's
early grids from a mathematical perspective.
"De Machine" in de opvatting van b.v. Piet Mondriaan
en Andy Warhol. Mondriaan was daar tegen, en Warhol niet.
De machine houdt niet de nieuwe cultuur
in. (. . .) De machine veralgemeent, zoals het militarisme veralgemeent.
Het kan het individueele verminderen -- het kan het ook dooden.
Piet Mondriaan: "De Jazz en
de Neo-plastiek." In: Yve-Alain Bois: Arthur Lehning en Mondriaan.
Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1984, pp. 89/90.
Order can serve as a metaphor for order.
Gombrich: The Sense of Order, p. 247. (In
deze passage van Gombrich heeft de gedenoteerde ordelijkheid
een positieve lading: Harmonie, het gevoel van ontspanning
als de "puzzelstukjes op hun plaats vallen".)
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Remko
Scha 
