Reverse engineering

Theo van Doesburg - Girl Knitting on the Harbor - 1918

Jean Metzinger - La Tricoteuse - 1919

Jesse Dale Cast - Woman in a Red Dress Knitting - 1936

Hieratic

Dénes Györgyi, Móric Pogány, and Emil Tőry - Hungarian Pavilion - Turin Universal Exhibition - 1911

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska - Hieratic head of Ezra Pound - 1914

Theo van Doesburg - Banister post - Alkmaar - 1917

Futur postérieur

Theo van Doesburg - Liggende vrouw (Nelly) - 1924

Wyndham Lewis - Nude 1 (Froanna) - 1919

Henri Matisse - Reclining nude, back - 1927

Loss of a halo

Photographer unknown - Koloman Moser - ca. 1903

I. K. Bonset [Theo van Doesburg] - Je suis contre tout et tous - 1921

César Domela - Ruth - 1928

First Men

"We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized!"

Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardeering, 1937

quoted in Malcolm Bradbury's London 1890-1920

Robert Delaunay - La fenêtre sur la ville no.3 - 1911–12

Edward Wadsworth - The Open Window - 1915

Theo van Doesburg - Counter composition XVII - 1926

Millennia of enlightenment

"The veiled tendency of society towards disaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon. In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it. Panic breaks once again, after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature."
Theodor Adorno, "Theses against occultism", Minima Moralia §151, 1951

Frantisek Kupka - Plans Verticaux I - 1912-3

El Lissitzky - Proun 5 - 1919

Theo van Doesburg - Architectural Analysis - 1923

Corporeal, Material Nature

“Aisthesis is the sensory experience of perception. The original field of aesthetics is not art but reality--corporeal, material nature.” 

Susan Buck-Mors, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,Walter Benjamin’s Artwork essay reconsidered, 1992

Cornelis Van Eesteren and Theo Van Doesburg - University Hall - 1923

Hans Van Der Laan - Abdij Roosenberg Waasmunster - East Flander - 1975

Auguste Perret - St Joseph Church - Le Havre - 1951 -  By Alexandra Polyakova

Moving towards a Ghost

"What would we be without the succor of what does not exist? (…) The myths are the souls of our actions and of our loves. We may only act while moving towards a ghost. We may only love what we have created.”

Paul Valery, Petite lettre sur les mythes, 1928

Attributed to Michelangelo - Detail from the 

unfinished Manchester Madonna - ca. 1497

Henri Matisse - Blue Nude IV - 1952

Theo van Doesburg - Archer (design for poster) - 1919

The Divine Parallelepipeds

"Then, as this morning on the dock, again I saw, as if for the first time in my life, the impeccably straight streets, the glistening glass of the pavement, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent dwellings, the square harmony of the grayish blue rows of Numbers. And it seemed to me that not past generations, but I myself, had won a victory over the old god and the old life."

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1921

quoted in James C. Scott, Seeing like a State, 1998

Walter Gropius - Bauhaus master houses - Dessau - 1925/1926

Cornelius van Eesteren and Theo van Doesburg - Axonometrics east/north of Maison Particulière - 1923

Iakov Chernikov - Aristography - 1914/1927

Invisible World

“The connecting of the idea of fourth dimension with existing theories of the invisible world or the world beyond is certainly quite fantastic, for, as has already been said, all religious, spiritualistic, theosophical and other theories of the invisible world first of all make it exactly similar to the visible and consequently ‘three-dimensional’ world.”
P. D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe, 1914

Gustav Klutsis - Composition - 1921

via Charnel House

Theo Van Doesburg - Tesseract with arrows pointing inward - 1924

Francesc Catala Roca - Dalí and hypercube - 1954