Well with the Pollock, fractal controversy raging, we went to the Tate collection of Modern art in London yesterday. Interestingly next to their Pollack painting they reference the Taylor article on fractals so maybe they still find the idea attractive. But more interesting was the note next to the work of the Dutch expressionist Piet Mondrian. If you know his works you can visualize his rather sparse canvases with only straight lines formed into rectangles with a bit of primary color here and there. Mondrian who was much influenced by Theosophist in the 1930s was attempting to paint the underlying form of nature, which he reduced to straight lines and rectangles. Well the interesting factoid at the Tate was that according to neurobiologist the visual system most readily responds to straight lines and rectangles. So Mondrian was intuiting the ordering of nature according to how we actually perceive it some 50 years before science discovered the reason.

Although I hate to reduce aesthetics to scientific explanations it would be interesting however if Mondrian using his meditation on the underlying forms of nature had not stumbled on to a truth about how we organize natural forms in our consciousness.

Anyway here is an article that goes into Mondrian and some other Modern masters such as Klee and Calder and their influence on the science of neurobiology.   more »