François Morellet
French artist who created Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares (1960) by delegating each square's colour to digits read aloud from a telephone directory.
What they make
Morellet works in paint, but the paintings are the record of a rule, not of a hand. Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares (1960) fixes each of 40,000 grid squares’ colour to digits read aloud from a telephone directory — a grid he drew, and a decision he declined to make himself.
Method
In Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares, the procedure was: draw the grid, then let digits read aloud from a telephone directory decide each square, one at a time, by a fixed rule. His own decisions stop at the grid and the rule; what happens inside the grid is not his to pick — see “In their own words” below for how he put this.
That refusal had a target: the lyrical, gestural abstraction that was the mainstream around him, which he wanted to be “radically different from.” Two encounters pointed him elsewhere instead — an exhibition of Max Bill’s work in São Paulo, and, on his first visit to Granada in 1952, the repetitive geometric patterning of the Alhambra.
Signature works
The one work this record documents: Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares (1960). It states the method as plainly as it gets — a grid, an external number source, a single rule — and stands in here for the wider practice.
What they pioneered
Assigning a painting’s individual decisions to a number source that already existed, rather than deciding them himself: a telephone directory, read aloud, decided which of 40,000 squares got marked. This bundle documents his own account of one work — read it as a documented instance of the move, not as a dated claim to being first.
In their own words
“I looked for ways to take the fewest possible subjective decisions in the process of the creation of a painting.”
“I wanted to be radically different from the lyrical abstraction of the École de Paris, which was the mainstream trend at that time, represented by popular artists such as Mathieu.”
“Max Bill had a big exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, which had a tremendous impact.”
“My third major shock came from the abstract Islamic networks of lines and repetitive pattern all over the walls of the Alhambra Palace in Granada on my first visit in 1952.”
Connected to
Pioneered: external number source as randomness oracle
Works: Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory