Question Art

This is one of Mondrian's diamond-shaped 'lozenge' canvases — apparently he kept returning to the format through the late twenties and thirties, paring the paintings down until almost nothing was left on them. Naming it after a dance feels almost like a joke next to how little is actually happening on the canvas.

They say Boccioni studied under Giacomo Balla in Rome around this time — another future Futurist — and you can see the dabbed, Divisionist brushwork they were both practicing before either of them started smashing forms apart for speed.

Apparently this is from a stretch in the mid-1920s when Lissitzky put the geometric shapes aside for a while and started cutting up photographs instead, trying to get a still picture to hold something moving. People point to this kind of layering as an early step toward the collage-heavy propaganda photography that came out of the Soviet Union not long after.

According to the city's tourism site, this one was commissioned by the shopping centre it's balanced on, taking its cue from all the ice cream stands doing business on the street below. Apparently the tilted tip was meant to echo the church spires on the skyline nearby — a mall dressed up, half-jokingly, as a cathedral of consumption.

I couldn't find why Oldenburg picked pool balls specifically for this one — if anyone knows, I'd love the story. What I did find is that blowing ordinary objects up to monument size was basically his whole practice for decades, one of the things credited with helping Pop art move off the canvas and into public parks.

Apparently this is one of the paintings people point to when they talk about cubism pushing all the way toward abstraction — there's barely anything left that reads as a literal scene. It's tied to a procession he remembered from Spain, but almost none of that original imagery survived into what's on the canvas.

I couldn't track down a name for this one, but the year puts it right in the stretch where he was working with an engineering firm to mass-produce cast aluminium forms — some from that batch were built as literal playground equipment for a shop. He's tagged as the godfather of Pop Art, but this run of work reads more like an industrial catalogue than a collage of magazine cuttings.

Apparently this is from before Boccioni signed onto Futurism in 1910 — a movement that made a point of rejecting quiet domestic scenes just like this one.

This apparently isn't a finished painting on its own — it's a sketch for a mural, so somewhere there might have been meant to be a full-size version on an actual wall. The gold sky, the ruins, the goats: all of it seems to be reaching for 'ancient Greece.'

Mondrian, from what I've read, believed grids like this could help build a calmer, more honest world after the first World War — a strict visual language everyone could read the same way.

They say Cork nicknamed this pair almost as soon as they went up, and that's still what most people call them, whatever the official title says.

He called this series 'Proun' — supposedly short for a phrase meaning something like 'project for affirming the new.' From what I've read it was his attempt at a kind of painting that wasn't quite painting or architecture, more a rough sketch for spaces that didn't exist yet.

Apparently Demuth spent a lot of his later years on watercolors like this one — fruit and vegetables, painted with the same precision people usually associate with his industrial scenes.

Apparently the idea goes back to a performance in Venice, built around bundling your whole household into a sack you could just roll to wherever you were headed next. Same trick he always pulled — blow up something ordinary until it can't be ignored — except here the ordinary thing carries real grief: they say the permanent version was recast as a memorial for refugees, since this exact plot once held a church built by families who'd fled with whatever they could carry.

According to what I found, it's carved from granite, around eleven metres tall and something like sixty tonnes, and it's set with its back to the town, facing out over open water instead.