Mathman's Delight

Arithmetical symmetry and structural repetition in architecture are as old as the pyramids, but the use of numbers to organize an impersonal art, devoid of any symbolism, is something that seems to have arrived with the computer era. Dozens of painters and sculptors of late have discarded figuration and imagery, and even the brush stroke laden with emotional direction as a means of organizing their art. As a substitute, they have turned to arithmetical series, algebraic permutations and modular combinations of shapes and forms; the works that they produce belong to a cool school of binary esthetics which would delight an IBM research mathematician (see color opposite).

The new minimal artists today play the numbers game partly in earnest. Their method is to tease the mind into engagement, to keep the viewer glued to the spot, tantalized by the riddle of why what has been put together goes together. The longer the spectator lingers, the more his eye will be seduced by incandescent color and light effects, the more his hand will reach out to stroke the glossy surface, until finally, or so the artists hope, he will find his mind soothed and diverted from work aday cares.

Mystical & Magical. No one currently developing the minimal mode employs a more sophisticated set of permutations and combinations than Manhattan's Sol LeWitt, 39, whose sleek, white-enameled aluminum 47 Three-Part Variations Using Three Different Kinds of Cubes recently occupied the entire front room of Manhattan's Dwan Gallery. LeWitt used a basic cube in three different versions: solid, with one side removed, and with two opposite sides removed. He arranged these cubes in columns of three, each column a different combination of cubes, then lined the columns up in rows. Gallerygoers solemnly filed among the boxes as through a snowy sea of machine-produced, box-topped sentinels. "You can't look at any part singly and get it," LeWitt explains. "You have to look at the entire group, the set."

Guatemala-born, Danish-bred Alfred Jensen, 64, bases his heavily impastoed, rainbow-hued paintings on abstruse arithmetical theories gleaned on his worldwide voyages, and from the study of Greek, Egyptian and Mayan temples and calendars. His latest series, displayed at Manhattan's Cordier & Ekstrom gallery earlier this month, is based on the proportions of Greek temples; Per 17, which measures 321 in. by 64 i in., was specifically inspired by the basilica at Paestum, dedicated to Poseidon, which has 2-to-1 proportions, with nine columns in the front, 18 on the side. To Jensen, as to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, individual numbers have mystical, almost magical properties, an abstract proof that "there is enormous complexity in the universe—and at the same time, simplicity."