The assembled shapes of Synthetic Cubism ultimately derived from the flat separate shapes of Gauguin. Mondrian's allegiance belonged to Impressionism and Seurat, to their concern with translating a sensation into a mesh of brushmarks. Mondrian's neo-Impressionist brushmarks of 1908-10 were elongated into the short lines of the seascapes and faades of 1914-15 which in turn were elongated into lines extending from side to side of the canvas and seemingly beyond."A painting by Malevich or Van Doesburg or Kupka is an assemblage of shapes. A Mondrian does not consist of blue rectangles and red rectangles and yellow rectangles and white rectangles. It is conceived - as is abundantly clear from the unfinished canvases - in terms of lines - lines that can move with the force of a thunderclap or the delicacy of a cat."Mondrian wanted the infinite, and shape is finite. A straight line is infinitely extendable, and the open-ended space between two parallel straight lines is infinitely extendable. A Mondrian abstract is the most compact imaginable pictorial harmony, the most self-sufficient of painted surfaces (besides being as intimate as a Dutch interior). At the same time it stretches far beyond its borders so that it seems a fragment of a larger cosmos or so that, getting a kind of feedback from the space which it rules beyond its boundaries, it acquires a second, illusory, scale by which the distances between points on the canvas seem measurable in miles." 'The positive and the negative are the causes of all action ... The positive and the negative break up oneness, they are the cause of all unhappiness. The union of the positive and the negative is happiness.' The palpable oneness of the solitary flower or tower, being subject to time and change, had to give way to the subliminal oneness of a vivid equilibrium." ...
