A Town Square at Night

In this modernist still life, a cup and saucer, plant, and pieces of fruit are rendered as geometric planes arranged along a grid of diagonals. Van Doesburg was actively involved in the debate between the defenders of naturalism and the advocates of abstraction. Artists and architects in both camps insisted their goal was complete visual harmony, and yet their approaches varied radically. Here, the underlying spatial structure and simplification of forms in the painting together with the artist’s original frame, designed to emphasize the flatness of the composition, demonstrate his commitment to abstraction as the universal visual language.