Serialism closely related to certain works from the de Stijl and Bauhaus movements in design and architecture called "serial art" by some writers (; ; ; ), specifically the paintings of Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Bart van Leck, Georg van Tongerloo, Richard Paul Lohse, and Burgoyne Diller, who had been seeking to “avoid repetition and symmetry on all structural levels and working with a limited number of elements” . Stockhausen described the final synthesis in this manner: So serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever: it's relativity and nothing else. It just says:
Death of the Virgin (van der Goes) 1480 when van der Goes began to excitedly talk about how he was a doomed, lost soul and attempted to commit suicide and had to be forcibly held down. This account greatly added to the painting's value in the eyes of late-19th-century painters. Vincent van Gogh mentions van der Goes three times in his letters, first in 1873 to his brother Theo, and on two more occasions when he wrote that he identified with the portrait of van der Goes in Emile Wauters's emotionally rendered 1872 painting "Hugo van der Goes Undergoing Treatment at the Red Cloister". Art historian Erwin