Fritz Glarner

Fritz Glarner (Zurich, 1899 – Locarno, 1972) was a Swiss-American painter associated with Concrete Art and, above all, a disciple of Piet Mondrian. His significance lies in carrying Neoplastic principles toward a personal language, which he called "relational painting."

He spent most of his life outside Switzerland. He grew up in Italy and France and studied and worked in Paris from 1923 to 1935, where by 1929 he already leaned toward nonrepresentational art and belonged to the Abstraction-Création group. He emigrated to the United States in 1936, living first in Manhattan and later in a studio and residence on Long Island.

His work starts from Mondrian's horizontal and vertical grid, with simplified colors arranged on an architectural pattern. Glarner introduced a diagonal into that strict geometry and devised equally systematic principles of composition. Like Mondrian, he limited his palette to red, yellow and blue, but he turned Mondrian's black line into a broad range of grays, used both as line and as areas of color. Many of his works are tondos, with relational structures ordered within a circle. These changes gave his compositions a vitality and spatial dimension that Mondrian's model lacked.

In 1966 he was seriously injured in rough seas during an ocean crossing. He returned to Switzerland in 1971, settling in Locarno, where he died the following year. Twenty-four of his works belong to the Museo Cantonale d'Arte in Lugano, and a mural by him is part of the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York.

His legacy rests on his mature work, which showed how geometric abstraction could expand without abandoning its system.