Seated Female Nude, her Hand on her Head, Theo van Doesburg, 1916

pen, h 229mm × w 159mm More details

Van Doesburg described in a letter that he had attempted ‘to introduce rhythmical movement in the torso and create a flat sense of space through lines and planes’ in this work. The drawing was the result of ‘further abstraction,’ by which he meant reducing the subject-matter to elementary forms. As for his colleague Mondrian, for Van Doesburg this was the path to a new, universal art.