Composition

By 1932, when Otto Freundlich fitted these planes of colour together in Paris, he had been working toward abstraction for over two decades. Every shape is a flat field of colour bounded by straight lines and curves, locked across the whole surface like a mosaic or a leaded window. Freundlich meant something exact by it. He called his ideal cosmic communism, a hope that colour and form, freed from any single object, could stand for a shared human community in which each part depends on the next. He saw the reds, blues and earthy browns as the forces that ought to shape free people, and he pursued the same idea in paint, in mosaic and in stained glass. This Composition reached Basel in 1968, a gift from the collector Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach.