Georges Vantongerloo

Composition (RN 5674), 1944

Georges Vantongerloo’s name and work are linked with two groups of artists who helped to shape Modernism: in 1918, after emigrating from Belgium, he became a member of De Stijl. Later he founded the abstraction-création group with Jean Arp, Albert Gleizes, František Kupka, et al. in 1931. Vantongerloo’s paintings are based on an insight that he had garnered from Spinoza’s ‘Ethics:’ that the universe presents itself as something in which everything is acting and necessarily creating effects. Thus matter is not something solid and fixed: instead, according to Vantongerloo, the ‘so-called inanimate bodies,’ are ‘energies,’ and they effectively form a spiritual space. Space as a question of sculptural shape and volume was not the answer to the search for ‘space as essence.’ Instead, it is the aspects of space, movement and time, which are inherent in all things to an equal extent, and which are perceived in relation to each other, that captivate Vantongerloo. Vantongerloo’s line pictures start with mathematical function equations.