Page 35 - Studio International - April 1974

GEORGES his Paris years 1948 to 1954, when he began to Max Bill, he exhibited in 1949 at the Kunsthaus
develop his own hard-edge style, representative in Zurich.5 Max Bill was his closest friend for
VANTONGERLOO: of an American new view on painting, many years, he it was who organized the
understood by its originators to be completely London show and prepared the catalogue which
MATHEMATICS, independent of any European influence. Kelly is still the only monographic documentation on
NATURE AND ART seemed not very much impressed; E. C. Vantongerloo.
Goossen writes : 'Kelly's account of this first His own ideas appeared during his life-time
MARGIT STABER encounter indicates fully his lack of rapport in two slender volumes, now long out of print
with the principles to which the Belgian artist and collectors' pieces. The first collection of his
had devoted his life. Vantongerloo was a lonely writings came out 1924 in Antwerp in French :
man, a member of the first generation of the de `L'art et son avenir', a small paperback of 57
Stijl group, who still felt it necessary to harangue pages and 27 illustrations. This unpretentious
The life of Georges Vantongerloo is quickly
his visitors with the old aesthetic battle songs. booklet described the evolution of his
told. He was born in Antwerp on 24 November,
-After an hour or so of monologue, he played the experiments in painting and sculpture, from the
1886, and he died in Paris on 5 November,
trumpet for another hour; then he showed them usual academic beginnings to the then
1965. At the academies in Antwerp and in
some of his more recent works, explaining at unheard-of use of mathematical formulae in art.
Brussels he had studied sculpture and painting.
length his mathematical theories. "He made me It also includes studies of the compositional
During World War One he came to Holland
where he met Piet Mondrian, Theo van principles in the work of Rogier van der Weyden
Doesburg and Bart van der Leck. These and a comparison of a Breughel painting The
contacts strengthened his own ideas about art Fall of the Rebellious Angels with one of the
and how to connect new creative concepts first abstract expressionist compositions of
with the development of a contemporary world. Kandinsky (1913), drawing attention to their
When van Doesburg founded the avant-garde common dynamic futuristic structure. The
periodical de Stijl in 1917, Vantongerloo became second book appeared in English in 1949 in
the youngest and, together with Mondrian, the New York under the title 'Paintings,
most significant contributor.' sculptures, reflections', as number 5 of the
The doctrine of Neoplasticism formulated series 'Problems of Contemporary Art'. " Also
by Mondrian - the research of an equivalent in a paperback, it was based entirely on his own
art to the universal harmonies of nature, work and the evolution of his thinking since the
projected into a rectangular pictorial image - twenties, concentrating mostly on the
could not satisfy either him or van Doesburg for justification of mathematics in att and giving, in
long. Vantongerloo's research was similarly a fragmented and aphoristic way, glimpses of
based on a belief that harmony and systems of the underlying art philosophy. The preface to
harmonious relationships are values man needs, the Wittenborn book was written by Max Bill
but he saw many ways of approaching and and he concluded: 'Between the years at
achieving this aim. For him the symbolism of Menton, when Vantongerloo reinforced the
the right-angle was a possibility, but never an basis of his art by lengthy mathematical studies,
end in itself. and today, there stand years of search, of
He worked quietly for some years in Menton synthesis by one of the most original thinkers
in the South of France until he moved to Paris and artists of our time, whose work has now
in 1928 where he lived a no less secluded life in attained a comprehensive breadth and gives
his studio, 7 Impasse du Rouet in the popular understand", Kelly recalls, "that his kind of evidence of the highest sensitivity.' In the same
14th arrondissement. During the thirties he paintings had to have reasons. I was glad that year of 1948, when this book appeared,
became involved in the modern movement once mine didn't" . . . Kelly nevertheless respected Vantongerloo had began to experiment with his
again: as before in Holland with de Stijl, now Vantongerloo and visited him several times Plexiglas objects, and the problems of
with the international group of 'Abstraction - more with other friends.'4 transparency, colour and infinite space
Creation'2. Looking through the archives of the After the war Vantongerloo did become fascinated him to the end of his life. In the
Vantongerloo estate, one finds a treasury of lonely and reminiscent, but it is a gross introduction to the Marlborough catalogue of
notes, commentaries and letters concerning the misunderstanding to call him doctrinaire. In 1962 Max Bill could say: 'More and more he
Dutch years and the Paris years - the story of a spite of his self-imposed isolation he was disassociates himself from the "making of works
man who gradually lost faith in the possibility of basically a happy man, although, at least during of art" and to an ever growing degree his works
correctly recording the history of art. the last period of his life, he would have liked to became idea patterns, sketches of captured
But Vantongerloo was not a misanthrope. have broken the barrier of silence between processes of nature.' But Vantongerloo's
Once the barrier of distrust broke down, he was himself and the public. A few exhibitions and innovations linking art with the development of
a gentle, amiable and generous man, never an important group show contribution were the natural sciences and the new technology
losing his quick Flemish humour. Anyone who attempted as a result: one show in 196o in began as early as 1917.
really wanted to know him and was really Zurich 'Concrete Art 5o years of development'; Vantongerloo can be called the inventor of
interested in his work was welcome in his in 1961 again in Zurich he had a small one-man the mathematical approach in art and he applied
modest cluttered studio with the self-designed show on the occasion of his 75th birthday; in it to look at nature in a new way. Geometry was
furniture.3 Many artists nowadays claim that 1962 there was a large and comprehensive instrumental to his intentions, his solutions were
they visited Vantongerloo, and through them retrospective show with 94 works in London. the most radical and also the most open ones at
we might retrace some of his influence on a Switzerland probably had the best chance to that time. He was science-minded in general,
younger generation. His concept of an artist's see Vantongerloo's work: there was the and he was familiar with Euclidian and non-
work excluded a direct formal retransmission `Constructivists' exhibition in Basle in 1937, Euclidian geometry, venturing - maybe without
and therefore cannot easily be tracked down in and 'Concrete Art' in Basle in 1944 - both pilot knowing it - into the tricky fields of topology.
someone else's imagery. One artist who went to shows in which he emerged as one of the key As a provocation he could say: 'I offer different
see Vantongerloo was Ellsworth Kelly during figures. Together with Antoine Pevsner and solutions to a single problem', he should have

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