Georges Vantongerloo, (1886-1965)

Spirale avec certaines taches

Spirale avec certaines taches
signed, inscribed and dated 'Spirale avec certaines taches Paris 1946 G. Vantongerloo' (verso)
oil and gouache on board mounted on the artist's frame
75 x 61cm (29 1/2 x 24in).
Painted in Paris in 1946

The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by Dr. Jakob Bill.

Provenance
The artist's studio.
Georges Baines Collection, Antwerp (acquired directly from the artist).
Thence by descent to the present owners.

Exhibited
Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, 1er Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Art abstrait, concret, constructivisme, non-figuratif, July 1946.
Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich, Antoine Pevsner, Georges Vantongerloo, Max Bill, 15 October - 13 November 1949, no. 78.
Washington, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Georges Vantongerloo. A traveling Retrospective Exhibition, 22 April - 17 June 1980, no. 176 (later travelled to Dallas & Los Angeles).
Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Georges Vantongerloo 1886 - 1965, 23 January - 16 March 1981, no. 176.
Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich, Georges Vantongerloo, 3 April ? 17 May 1981, no. 176.
Antwerp, Ronny Van de Velde, Georges Vantongerloo 1886 - 1965, 15 December 1996 ? 31 March 1997, no. 176.
Barcelona, MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic, 19 April - 18 June 2000, no. 232 (later travelled to London, Hayward Gallery).
Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Musée Matisse, Georges Vantongerloo 1886 - 1965, un pionnier de la sculpture moderne, 28 October 2007 - 2 March 2008 (later travelled to Ostend).
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Georges Vantongerloo: A Longing for Eternity, 3 November 2009 - 22 February 2010.

Literature
G. Vantongerloo, 'Paintings, Sculptures, Reflections', in Problems of Contemporary Art no. 5, New York, 1948, no. 176, fig. 44 (illustrated).

'Space contains a number of qualities.
It expands in all directions.
It is without limits.
It is uninterrupted, which means that a volume occupies a part of the void; and a void and volume make space.
The great truth, the absolute truth, makes itself visible to our mind by means of the invisible.'

Georges Vantongerloo, quoted in his 'Reflections' written in The Hague, 1917. The first part published in no. 9/1 of the journal De Stijl in July 1918.

Spirale avec certaines taches was painted by the pioneering abstract artist, Georges Vantongerloo, in 1946. It issues from the mature part of his oeuvre when the artist was fully realising the far-reaching implications of his earliest artistic experiments and writings on concrete art. Writing to the former owner of the present work, the renowned Belgian architect Georges Baines in 1964, the artist states 'it took some time to comprehend that in 1917 my instincts were correct but not my understanding' (G. Baines, Georges Vantongerloo, 'The Influence of the Works of Wouters and the Origin of the First Abstract Works' (unpublished essay), 1981).

Born and educated in Antwerp yet exiled to Holland during the First World War, Vantongerloo became a founding contributor to the highly influential journal De Stijl as well as a signatory of the group's first manifesto. In late March 1918, the young Vantongerloo approached the editor of De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg, at his studio in Leiden with a notebook containing the beginnings of his 'Reflections', written in the preceding year, on the future of art and role of the artist. The content fascinated Van Doesburg and he agreed to publish the text under a new title 'Reflections by G. Vantongerloo' over the course of seven editions of the magazine up until 1920.

De Stijl's lasting influence on the development of Twentieth Century modern art and design cannot be overstated. Indeed, at the time, the journal was not simply the vehicle for Piet Mondrian's theories on art and Neo-Plasticism but also the mouthpiece for radical contemporary art across Western Europe. Among the renowned contributors, including Van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Piet Mondrian, Vantongerloo was the youngest and most progressive (Mondrian's junior by some 14 years), and his distinct involvement with the group is testament to his unrelenting desire for authenticity and universal truths within his own art.

From 1918 many of Vantongerloo's paintings paralleled the orthogonal grids of Mondrian, though he soon broke away from the limited palette of three primary colours espoused by Mondrian and Van der Leck to employ a chromatic range of seven hues including purple. Vantongerloo's unusual use of colour was in fact the main subject of the active correspondence which ensued between the two artists following Vantongerloo's first meeting with Mondrian in April 1920. After a brief spell in Brussels after the war, Theo van Doesburg informed Vantongerloo that Mondrian wished to make his acquaintance, and so Vantongerloo travelled to Paris en route to Menton on the French Riviera, where he had decided to make his home. It was an encounter which, despite their ideological differences, prompted a life-long friendship forged on their mutual dedication to abstraction in the search for universal values.

After Vantongerloo's move to Paris in 1928, where he initially stayed at Mondrian's home in the capital, both artists would become founding members of the Cercle et Carré group and later, Abstraction-Création; movements which upheld the concepts of 'Abstraction' and 'Constructivism' in opposition to the powerful influence of the Surrealist movement sweeping across Paris. Vantongerloo was elected vice-president of Abstraction-Création from 1931 - 1937, and was instrumental in the realisation of group exhibitions, as well as in the production of the eponymous pamphlet which published non-figurative work from members of the group, including Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Franti?zek Kupka and Jean Arp. This movement was crucial to the galvanisation of geometric and abstract art in the first half of the Twentieth Century and succeeded in bringing together a group of abstract artists from differing theoretical backgrounds.

Following the move to Paris and up until 1936, Vantongerloo established a unity of volumes, colours and planes within his paintings grounded on science and complex mathematical formulas. An approach so unique that Margit Staber has named Vantongerloo 'the inventor of the mathematical approach in art' (G. Brett (ed.), Force Fields, Phases of the Kinetic, exh. cat., Barcelona, 2000, p. 18). While these works retain the horizontal ? vertical compositions akin to the De Stijl aesthetic, their underlying principles remain quite different. From 1937 however a dramatic shift occurred in Vantongerloo's painting which acted in total defiance to De Stijl's doctrine, namely the introduction of the curve. Indeed, when Mondrian was first informed of Vantongerloo's use of the curve in 1938 it was noted that he replied, 'I might have known' with a wry smile.

These new, dynamic lines serve to soften the austere constructions of his former paintings and release them from measurable geometric constraints. Reflecting upon this transition, the artist wrote to his close friend, the artist Max Bill: 'I have occupied myself and thought about art for many years but the history of the different aspects of curves has made me think that there are no rules in art, that is to say, each work has its own rules and if one repeats them one falls into dogma. Each work of art must be born with its own character' (G. Vantongerloo, 10 January 1947, quoted in M. Bill, (ed.) Georges Vantongerloo, exh. cat., London, 1962).

It was at this time that his works increasingly became concerned with the natural world and phenomena observed rather than hypothesised: 'One paints directly from nature' the artist explained, 'not in order to copy, but in an effort to penetrate the mystery of nature through observation and to express the feelings of grandeur received from the phenomenon observed' (G. Vantongerloo, 'Paintings, Sculptures, Reflections' in Problems of Contemporary Art, New York, Vol. V, 1948, p. 3). Liberated from the rectilinear confinements of a closed grid, the white ground of his works become 'a special theatre where the composition takes place' (G. Vantongerloo, letter to Max Bill 12 March 1945, quoted in M. Bill, (ed.), op. cit.). Compositions which, in their ever-growing free form, reveal themselves as 'idea patterns, sketches of the captured processes of nature...Vantongerloo in a sense produces new realities, reducing the invisible by mental process to aesthetic facts' (M. Bill, (ed.), ibid., p. 5).

It was by deducing these aesthetic facts that Vantongerloo was able to 'take a sounding of the incommensurable'. In other words, to perceive the immeasurable, infinite and intangible energies which underpin the universe. Though we are unable to perceive the infinite through our five senses, Vantongerloo explains, 'through discernment and deduction, through the subtlety of the sensibility and through science, man is able to approach the inconceivable' (G. Vantongerloo, 'To Perceive', 1957, quoted in G. Brett (ed.), op. cit., pp. 234 - 235).

Spirale avec certaines taches is a consummate example of Vantongerloo taking a 'sounding of the incommensurable'. Illustrating a multi-coloured filament in the form of a spiral surrounded by scattered constellations of spots / dots or points in varying sizes against a smooth white support, the work immediately recalls associations with the Fibonacci sequence and the golden spiral - mathematical principles which achieve balance and beauty in art yet which are to be found reproduced in the natural world in the form of nautilus shells, pinecones, seed heads and spiral galaxies. Nature was a constant source of wonder and insight for Vantongerloo but never a subject for his art, 'I have painted from nature ? not the visible but what I feel, and it is not objective but what I consciously feel for form' (G. Vantongerloo...