Even abstract paintings such as Piet Mondrian's 1912 cubist Gray Tree, which doesn’t visually show treelike colours, can be identified as trees if a realistic value for α is used, researchers say.

The authors studied a series of works by abstract painter Mondrian that depict the same tree but in increasingly less realistic ways. His 1911 work “De Grijze Boom” (“The Gray Tree”) shows ...

Piet Mondrian was an early 20th-century abstract ... When I saw Mondrian’s 1911 “Gray Tree,” I immediately recognized something about trees that I had struggled to describe.

Even abstract paintings such as Piet Mondrian's 1912 cubist Gray Tree, which doesn’t visually show treelike colours, can be identified as trees if a realistic value for α is used, researchers say.