@N0-11: The irony, of course, is the "wallpaper cats" aren't so much a window into madness as him channeling his distress from the conditions at Springfield. Besides which, I honestly don't know how someone can look at these quasi-fractal patterns and think they require anything less than meticulous geometry. :P

It's not quite the same subject since his was a conscious shift into modernism, but I'm reminded of the trajectory of Lawren Harris: he began painting realism, became iconic for geometric symbolism, and by mid-century had devoted himself to pure abstraction—his muse apparently being mountains rather than cats.