Composition # 81 „Lyric-dramatic Composition‟, 1956

About the Work

Colour and form vibrate in 'Composition # 81', in which Adolf Fleischmann combines Geometric Abstraction with picturesque painting and composes angular forms to create a harmonious whole. Black lines frame the grey and coloured fields horizontally and partly jut out into them. They are balanced by a vertical structure and fine rod elements which hover silently in space on a prescribed level. Fleischmann, who was vilified in 1933 as "degenerate", fled to France and emigrated to New York in 1952. He was greatly influenced by the artists of Classic Modernism on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Piet Mondrian, from whom he adopted the rigorous horizontal-vertical structure. Fleischmann translated this modernist grid into a centrally concentrated all-over structure in which the difference between form and surface is dissolved.