| Artist: | Mondrian, Piet |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Composition with Red, Blue, & Yellow | |
| Date of Work: | 1935-1942 | |
| Nationality: | Dutch | |
| Context: | Hard-Edge Geometric Abstraction | |
| Movement: | Dutch Neo-Plasticism, or De Stijl | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: Mondrian's mature style develops in 1921 and after that he continues to play variations on the theme of the black bands, the white field, and the squares or blocks of the three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. These become his Neo-Plastic purities for expressing an underlying cosmic order through a dynamic balance between the opposing forces of the vertical and the horizontal. Style: more mature development of the plus-and-minus grid in which he creates a tight, allover unity or compositional network by extending the black bands from one side of the canvasa to the next; flat planes of color are sometimes contained within the black bands and sometimes they float on their own. Each element--line, color, shape--holds its own in the allover compositional network. No diagonal lines are allowed within the compositional field; he rigidly maintains the crossing of the vertical and the horizontal through right angles only with no tipped axis. It is all a matter of dynamic relations between line, color, shape, and flat, planar space. When these Neo-Plastic elements become more complex in their relations as they do here, it is the later years, after1930. For Mondrian, it will always be a matter of balancing two opposing forces: 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 (the color green is banished from his painting and his studio), 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. The painting is not framed, but mounted on a flat board on a white wall. Mondrian paints on the surface, not within the frame. The style has a machine-like precision. Mondrian is the anti-Expressionist. Context: a utopian view that affirms an order underlying nature, an amazing breakthrough considering that he got to this point during WWI. 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. | ||
