Trees depicted in famous artworks across a range of styles follow the same mathematical rules as their real-life counterparts ...

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 ...

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.