The Krauss Cross
"If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.
Or, to take a more up-to-date example, we could think about Ad Reinhardt who, despite his repeated insistence that 'Art is art,' ended up by painting a series of black nine-square grids in which the motif that inescapably emerges is a Greek cross. There is no painter in the West who can be unaware of the symbolic power of the cruciform shape and the Pandora's box of spiritual reference that is opened once one uses it."
Rebecca Goldstein on
Mathematics and Narrative:
"I don't write exclusively on Jewish themes or about Jewish characters. My collection of short stories, Strange Attractors, contained nine pieces, five of which were, to some degree, Jewish, and this ratio has provided me with a precise mathematical answer (for me, still the best kind of answer) to the question of whether I am a Jewish writer. I am five-ninths a Jewish writer."
Jacques Maritain,
October 1941:
"The passion of Israel
today is taking on
more and more distinctly
the form of the Cross."
E. L. Doctorow,
City of God:
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd."