COMPOSITION y=-x2+3x+10

This gouache was executed while Georges Vantongerloo was involved in the Abstract-Création movement, which he co-founded in 1931 with Auguste Herbin and Jean Hélion to promote abstract art during the period in the 1920s and 1930s when contemporary art trends in Paris had turned towards Surrealism and other representational art.

Originally part of the De Stijl movement, Vantongerloo, a Belgian abstract painter, was strongly influenced by the horizontal and vertical constructions associated with Mondrian. After moving to France in 1921, over the next two decades, Vantongerloo constructed his works following geometric and later algebraic formulae, evidenced in this work which is related to the oil -x2+3x+10 = y rouge-vert-noir, 1934 (no. 85 in the artist's Oeuvre-Catalogue). Writing of the influence of mathematics at the very foundation of his work, the artist described how even 'my studies at school and at the Beaux-Arts went hand in hand with Euclidean geometry' (op.cit p. 53). As the artist Max Bill, a previous owner of this gouache, describes, during this time Vantongerloo developed 'the horizontal-vertical system of relationships to masterly perfection, wresting ever new possibilities from these limited structures' (M. Bill, in exhib. cat. Georges Vantongerloo, Marlborough New London Gallery, 1962, p. 5).