| Artist: | Mondrian, Piet |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Composition 10 (Pier and Ocean; plus-and-minus) | |
| Date of Work: | 1915 | |
| Nationality: | Dutch | |
| Context: | Hard-Edge Geometric Abstraction | |
| Movement: | Dutch Neo-Plasticism, or De Stijl | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: Here Mondrian sets out to map or grid something as shifting and ephemeral as water; this is his plus-and-minus diagram of the ocean with a pier indicated by the vertical lines in the lower center. If you can grid an ocean, what can't you grid? Mondrian's faith that there is an underlying order to nature. Style: in the plus-and-minus grid he works the vertical and horizontal, seeking a dynamic balance between these two opposing forces. For Mondrian, the vertical = male = space = statics = harmony, while the horizontal = female = time = dynamics = melody. The point of their intersection becomes the charged drama played out in his hard-edge geometric style that rids the scenes of any specific associations to the external world, leaving only a structural dynamics behind. A reductive, purifying search for essential truths (the hidden drama of nature) through the principle of absolute abstraction (non-objectivity). No personal touch or individual expression; he seeks timeless, universal turths. Context: a utopian view that affirms an order underlying nature, an amazing breakthrough considering that all around neutral Holland a world war was being fought. In the midst of chaos and change, Mondrian seeks the timeless, underlying grid. He in effect unfolds the cube, taking cubism beyond Picasso and Braque's stopping point to the ultimate form of geometric abstraction: the grid. The style of the plus-and-minus would become the foundation of his entire aesthetic system, which seeks a dynamic balance of the opposing forces of the vertical and the horizontal. He is not solely concerned with aesthetics or formalism, however; his aesthetics are linked to his ethics: a desire to bring harmony and order to all areas of the environment (such as industrial and architectual design). This was the reason he helped launch the magazine called "De Stijl" (The Style), which preached the virtues of Neo-Plasticism, the "pure reality" of an abstract painting as opposed to an illusionistic reality based on the imitation of nature. He dedicated his 1920 pamphlet on "Neo-Plasticism" to "future man." This interest in a reductive, purifying art comes in part from his Dutch background: the rectilinear Dutch landscape (Holland is a grid) and the Calvinist theology of puritanism and iconoclasm that banished the representation of nature and God from art in the 16th century. In Dutch the word "schoon" means cleanliness, purity, and beauty, condensing these ideas in one word and one principle, which Mondrian's art reflects very well. | ||
