Bohemians at the Gate?

Piet Mondrian is one of the great modernists. Readers will be familiar with his iconic primary-coloured rectangles and perpendicular black lines on a white background, even if they do not recognise the name. These paintings are cornerstones in the development of expressionism and minimalism. The most famous sold for more than $50 million in 2015. In the 1960s, two decades after Mondrian’s death, an early computer artist called Hiroshi Kawano developed a statistical prediction of which colours Mondrian would choose, and how long he would make the lines. It was based on his body of work. He wrote the programme using the rudimentary programming language of the day and calculated the results on the University of Tokyo’s mainframe computer. The computer couldn’t output colour images and so Kawano would take the statistical results and hand-paint the coloured rectangles. Kawano did not use the exact same primary colour palette as Mondrian to “[express] his admiration for Piet Mondrian…witho ... Read full article.