Dancers

The two figures here started as a Hindu god. Around 1916 Theo van Doesburg took an Indian statuette of Krishna playing his flute and reduced it to circles, triangles and bars, painting it twice across a two-panel work, once seen from the front and once from behind. The muted black, green, blue and gold are deliberate. Like many artists of his generation he was reading theosophy, a spiritual movement that held a hidden order lay beneath the visible world, and he wanted colour and shape to stand for that inner state rather than copy a body. This is abstraction reached through religion, not geometry, painted on cement board four years before his first strict grids. The flute is still just legible in the angled lines.