Tarantella 1918

Theo van Doesburg made this black ink drawing, Tarantella. It's a stack of horizontal and vertical rectangles on a white background. The rectangles touch each other to make a single composition that occupies most of the vertical space. I feel for van Doesburg making this drawing. The grid must have been a tough nut to crack! The off-centered rectangles create some visual tension. There is a kind of implied movement upward. You can see how he was thinking about what the grid could be: not a place for boring repetition, but rather for expression and rhythm. Theo van Doesburg was an artist who was really thinking about new languages for painting. We can see the legacy of his formal experiments in contemporary abstraction today. Artists are constantly building on what other artists have done, creating new forms of expression!