The Grid

With regard to the advent of the grid in twentieth-century
art, there is the need to think etiologically rather than
historically. Certain conditions combined to precipitate
the grid into a position of aesthetic pre-eminence. We
can speak of what those things are and how they come
together throughout the nineteenth century and then spot
the moment of chemical combination, as it were, in the
early decades of the twentieth. But once the grid appears
it seems quite resistant to change. The mature careers of
Mondrian or Albers are examples of this. No one would
characterize the course of decade after decade of their
later work as developmental. But by depriving their world
of development, one is obviously not depriving it of
quality. There is no necessary connection between good
art and change, no matter how conditioned we may be to
think that there is. Indeed, as we have a more and more
extended experience of the grid, we have discovered that
one of the most modernist things about it is its capacity
to serve as a paradigm or model for the anti-
developmental, the anti-narrative, the anti-historical.

Rosalind E. Krauss in Grids (from: The Originality of
the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, p. 22)

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