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Can we speak of a geometric abstractionist tradition within postwar American art? In 1936, when Alfred Barr, the director of the then-new Museum of Modern Art, wrote that the two main strands of abstract art consisted of the expressionistic and the geometric, he was observing a geometric strain developing through Cubism, Constructivism, and the abstract 'pure' forms of Mondrian. (1) With the founding of the Guggenheim Museum of Non-Object Painting in 1937 and the first American retrospective of Mondrian in 1945 at the MoMA, geometric abstraction in the United States began to play a …