Composition No. 8

This collage is the work of one of Piet Mondrian's closest collaborators and defenders, whose assumed name is an anagram of the name of Orpheus, the prophetic poet and musician of Greek mythology. Seuphor became an influential proponent of abstract art through his writings and his efforts to organize groups of artists. The sense of the natural form of a flower or a tree within this abstract collage was probably intentional, for Seuphor wrote: As for myself, I confess to a preference for clear-cut situations, for radical and even extreme positions. But I also feel a secret and very strong attraction to ambiguous situations…. That which is pure transition, is all the more appealing to the mind because of its elusiveness. It is the same in the cases of Mondrian, Kandinsky and the Cubists: abstraction and figuration have a common frontier in their work that is so tenuous that we often do not know which side we are on.