The playful charm of an irrefutable calculation, Max Bill's graphic work was considered the delicacy of Concrete Art. In Bill's words, his paintings should have an activating, calming, concentrating and harmonizing effect on the viewer. The viewer is drawn into his methods, invited, as in all art, to interpret parts of the whole in different contexts. Bill put intuition aside, as he himself said, and replaced it with method, functionality and efficiency. In the foreground are calculable, estimable and predictable factors, as well as feasibility. Form as a clear-cut element. Bill trusted logical combination and developed his world view of harmony and units of measure far from any allusion or association with the purist canons of Concrete Art. This harmony and ingenious accessories are evident in this beautiful print, Zweimal vier gleiche Teile (Four Times Four Equal Parts, printing and publishing by Erker Presse, St. Gallen, 1980). In the play of images, resembling each other in their regularity, the viewer experiences the flexibility and interchangeability of the composing parts, and at the same time, their necessity, their functionality.

As one of the most idolized representatives of Constructive-Concrete Art, Bill saw his artistic language as embodying a universal objectivity. These column parts correspond to the Golden Section. 'Harmonie der Säulen' (Harmony of Columns, 1979, printed and published by Erker Presse, St. Gallen) is a lithograph in four colors. A longer look at this print will allow the viewer to experiment a pulsating back and forth movement of the similar vertical paths. A movement into depth is evident, although only on a superficial level. Bill's personal artistic vision was that of the Harmonia Mundi, in the sense of the architectural construction of a mathematic-geometrical cosmos, based on Plato's ideals. Bill left us a variety of theoretical essays in which he remained wholly committed to the Bauhaus tradition. His pictorial reasoning is that of an architect and designer as well as a painter and sculptor. The motif of columns recalls the colored enamel plates of the 70's in the Albert Einstein Monument (1979-80) or the pavilion created at the same time with a column sculpture on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich.

These checkerboard images, compositions of squares, are a long-time discipline of Max Bill's. In 1983, the color lithograph, Komposition 83 (Composition 83), was printed by Erker Presse, St. Gallen. The white background becomes a fixed form, and two overlapping rectangles are linked in a prismatic color gradation. Bill knew how to crown contemporary functional ideas of this bright serenity. Four equally bright, either cold or warm colors alternate in ever new combinations. In his later work, he creates related compositions on canvas. This is perfection based on geometric order. According to Hegel, the highest interests of the human spirit: color, volume, surface, space. In 1979, he produced the series 'Sieben Verschiebungen im gleichen System' (Seven Alterations within the Same System), in which there are three horizontal rectangles. It is like a sort of anagram construction in which the same letters can be combined to form different words.