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arose among the demiurges, their disunity grew to hatred. Every painter, 
every sculptor wanted to be the most astonishing of creators. Anonymity and 
humility were replaced by fame and artifice. 
Man has lost his feeling for beauty. He has become unreal. In place of pyra 
mids, temples, cathedrals, he produces deception, appearance, artifice. 
Reality 
Our works are structures of lines, surfaces, forms, colors. They attempt to 
approach reality. They hate artifice, vanity, imitation, tight-rope walking. 
To be sure, there are tight-rope walkers of varying talent. But art should lead 
to the spiritual, the real. This reality is neither objective reality, nor the sub 
jective reality of thought, that is, ideality, but a mystical reality, toward which 
we stand in the relation of the eye in the following Neoplatonic image: “It 
removes itself from light in order to see the darkness, but it does not see; for 
it cannot see the darkness when there is light, but without light it does not 
see; by not seeing, it sees the darkness in the way that is natural to it.” 
Above and below 
In former times man knew the meaning of above and below, he knew what 
was eternal and what was transitory. Man did not yet stand on his head. His 
houses had a floor, walls and a ceiling. The Renaissance transformed the ceil 
ing into a fools’ heaven, the walls into garden mazes, and the floor into the 
bottomless. Man has lost his sense of reality, the mystical, the determinate in 
determinable, the greatest determinate of all. 
A part of reality 
Constructive art glorifies the modern, material world, progress, the ma 
chine. Neo-plastic art breaks away from the material world. A few vertical 
and horizontal lines, two, three colors and a “balance” are all that is left of it. 
In reply to an Anglo-Saxon visitor who asked if he always painted squares, 
Mondrian replied: “Squares? I see no squares in my pictures.” Thus even 
squares and right angles were no longer tolerated in the world of the fine