The Reductive Impluse

Piet Mondrian, No. 9, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

"Speaking in the broadest art-historical terms, a reductive sensibility pervades much of the avant-garde art of the twentieth century. Spanning from its earliest decades to the new millenium, a progressive aesthetics of formal clarity developed during the century in tandem with the evolution of abstraction. During the 1920s, Piet Mondrian's omission of all extraneous details from his geometric paintings was prompted by a utopian impulse that equated purity of form with spiritual transcendence."
-- Nancy Spector, from Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), Guggenheim Museum, 2004