Studies for composition (The Cow), 1917. Composition VIII (The Cow), 1918.
Van Doesburg made this painting a few months after working on the cow studies. He began with a series of figurative sketches, then transformed them into a geometric composition of colored horizontal and vertical bands. The central area of white maintains a connection to the work’s original figure.
In analyzing the form of a cow, Van Doesburg turns it step by step into a group of rectangles, eliminating all the curved and triangular elements. He published several of these works in a widely distributed treatise he wrote on the De Stijl. This unveiling of the figurative source of an abstract work served both a pedagogical and a polemical purpose’: to educate his audience and to justify his practice.