Rhythm in art is the repetition of a shape, a color or a line at intervals that sets the pace at which the eye moves across a work. It is the visual counterpart of a beat in music, and it shows best in Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, painted in New York in 1942 and 1943.
In that canvas small blocks of color flicker from one intersection to the next, and the Museum of Modern Art, which owns it, says they create a "vital and pulsing rhythm." Its text compares the eye's path to traffic moving through the streets of New York. Nothing in the picture moves, and yet the eye is carried from block to block as if it were keeping time.
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The usual story says that painting borrowed the word from music. The history of the word runs the other way. In Greek, rhuthmos did not first mean a beat at all. It meant a shape, the form something takes.
The philosopher Democritus, who held in the fifth century BC that the world is made of atoms, used it for the shape of those atoms, and the linguist Émile Benveniste, who traced the word in the twentieth century, read it as an improvised, temporary, changeable form, the shape of something fluid.
Rhythm learned to keep time later, in the fourth century BC. In the Laws, Plato defined it as the order of motion, and from then on a word for form was also a word for form in movement. That is the sense a painter relies on when a canvas is said to have rhythm: a shape that has a pace.
A painting cannot move, so a painter who wants rhythm has to find a beat in something that stays still. Piet Mondrian found his in New York, in a style of piano music, and it pulled him out of the grid that had defined his painting.
What did the word rhythm mean before it meant a beat?
It meant shape. Before Plato, the Greek word rhuthmos described the form of a thing, especially a form that could change, such as the figure a fluid takes as it moves…
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