Piet Mondrian
Dutch painter who authored the Neoplasticism essay and whose strict-grid compositions De Stijl generalised, and whose 1917 painting Noll later digitised.
Run it
What it looks like when it goes wrong (3)
- Without a minimum gap, bars are free to sit flush against or inside one another, so raising the bar count no longer spreads them out — they fuse into a solid black mass with no white showing between them. The placement rule collapses into no rule at all, even though every bar is still individually orthogonal.
- A single bar leaving horizontal/vertical is enough to change how the whole composition reads, even though every other bar still obeys every other rule. The vocabulary was never about individual bars being black or straight-edged — it was about the fixed pair of directions, and one exception breaks that instantly.
- Asking for more bars than a wide minimum gap can fit means most placement attempts fail silently and get skipped. The result looks sparser than the bar-count control implies — a mismatch between what was asked for and what the space and the rule can actually hold, not a bug in the rule itself.
Clean-room implementation — written from the described algorithm, not from source. Reuse policy
What they make
The evidence here describes one painting directly: a 1916/1917 composition of “precisely placed horizontal and vertical black bars over a white background.” That is the whole visible vocabulary in this bundle — no diagonals, no curves, a fixed pair of directions and a ground that stays empty around them.
Method
De Stijl treated that vocabulary as movement doctrine, at least for a while: the group initially adopted Mondrian’s principles and held to them until around 1924, when Theo van Doesburg proposed Elementarism — diagonal lines — and split the group. That a diagonal was enough to break with the movement is the tell: horizontal/vertical was not a stylistic preference so much as a rule everyone else could see being broken. Gerrit Rietveld built the only structure realised entirely to De Stijl’s principles; Bart van der Leck, a founding De Stijl painter, eventually left the abstraction behind for figurative work. None of this evidence describes Mondrian writing rules for a machine, or setting his process down step by step. What it shows is a vocabulary restricted enough, and held to consistently enough, that the restriction itself became visible and nameable to other people — which is the precondition for anyone formalising it later.
Signature works
The 1916/1917 composition above is the one A. Michael Noll used as the human half of his comparison, generating a pseudorandom re-encoding of it on an IBM mainframe. Decades later, Broadway Boogie-Woogie gave John F. Simon Jr. the starting point for ComplexCity (2000), an algorithmic reworking rather than a copy.
What they pioneered
Per this evidence, Mondrian authored the Neoplasticism essay, and De Stijl generalised his strict-grid compositions from it into movement practice. That’s a theoretical and painterly contribution, not a computational one — nothing here suggests he thought of his compositions as rule sets for reproduction. He belongs on this site because that restriction turned out, after the fact, to be tight enough for someone else to formalise and run a direct comparison against — see human-or-machine preference test for what actually happened when they did, and what the result does and doesn’t show.
In their own words
No direct quotation from Mondrian appears in this page’s evidence. What is here is a later encyclopedic account of De Stijl adopting his principles, and a description of one painting from the write-up of Noll’s experiment — not Mondrian’s own words.
Connected to
Part of: De Stijl
Influenced: A. Michael Noll
Works: Composition in Line