Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow
Piet Mondrain. 1930 C.E. Netherlands. Oil on canvas
Represents a mature stage of Mondrian's abstraction. It seems to be a flat work, but there are differences in the texture of different elements. While the black stripes are the flattest of the paintings, in the areas with color are clear the brushstrokes, all in the same direction. The white spaces are, on the contrary, painted in layers, using brushstrokes that are put in different directions. And all of these produce a depth that, to the naked eye, cannot be appreciated.
Form
Black lines of varying widths against white backgrounds, relieved occasionally by a primary color “climax” (red, yellow or blue) in as pure a state as possible. Mondrian composed this painting as a harmony of contrasts that signify both balance and the tension of dynamic forces. Mondrian eradicates the entire notion of illusionistic depth predicated on a figure in front of a background. He achieves a harmonious tension by his asymmetrical placement of primary colors that balance the blocks of white paint.
Function
To reveal the underlying eternal structure of existence. His goal was to create a precise, mechanical order, lacking in the natural world. To create an art of harmony and order, qualities missing from the war torn world. Mondrian and other modernists wanted to move painting beyond naturalistic depiction to focus instead on the material properties of paint and its unique ability to express ideas abstractly using formal elements such as line and color.
Content
Squares or rectangles painted in flat primary colors, separated by black lines of varying widths. Totally non-objective and abstract. Piet Mondrian loved straight lines and primary colors. Out of that love, he created a whole philosophy called neoplasticism, which was based on only using those elements in abstract painting. For him, this new way of making art held the possibility of “aesthetic purity.” He scoffed at painting that actually replicated the world, believing that representational forms were too literal; they didn’t do justice to thoughts or concepts. Only primary colors, from which all other colors derive, and geometric shapes, the basic building blocks of structure, were good enough for Mondrian.
Context
Destijl, a movement symbolized by the Dutch painter Mondrian, reached its height between 1917 and the 1930’s. At it’s purest, DeStijl paintings are completely abstract; even the titles make no reference too nature. They are painted on a white background and use black lines to shape the rectangular spaces. Only 3 primary colors are used; red, yellow and blue, and they are painted without modulation. Lines can only be placed perpendicularly.--diagonals are forbidden. Destijl artists believed in the birth of the new age in the wake of WWI. They tried to create a utopian aesthetic that was a balance between individual and universal values, when the machine would assure ease of living. They declared “There is an old and a new consciousness of time. The old is connected with the individual. The new is connected with the universal.” During WWI, Mondrian stayed in Laren, a village with a thriving art community near Amsterdam. He lived near M.H.J. Schoenmaeker, a prominent Theosophist who used terms such as “New Plastic” to promote his ideas on spiritual evolution and the unification of the real and the ideal, the physical and immaterial. In Theosophy, lines, shapes, and colors symbolized the unity of spiritual and natural forces.
Innovation
In previous centuries, a picture was a reflection, in one way or another, of the outside world. In 20th century abstraction, artists free themselves from the representational convention. Natural appearances play little part in their designs, which reduce a landscape to a system of geometrical shapes patterns, lines, angles, and swirls of color. Their imagination and invention are concentrated on pictorial mechanics and the arrangement of patterns shapes, textures, and colors. From the semi abstract cubist art, in which objects are still discernible, abstraction moves toward nonobjectivism, in which a work of art has no meaning outside itself, and the picture becomes its own self defining referent. Mondrian painted landscapes and quiet interior scenes in the tradition of his native Holland, and his later style, though completely abstract, owes much to the cool geometrical precision of his great predecessor Vermeer.
Artistic Decision
Mondrian delighted in the crisscross patterns of the city streets, architects blueprints, gaunt steel skeletons of skyscrapers under construction, and simple faces of buildings of the international architectural style. All references to the “primitive animal nature of man” should be rigidly excluded in order to reveal “true human nature” through an art of “balance, unity, and stability.” He strove to realize this dream by using “only a single neutral form: the rectangular area in varying dimensions.” Neoplasticism went by another name, de Stijl, Dutch for “the style,” and consisted of a group of artists and architects all over Europe, all making work in the same vein. Theo van Doesberg was one of the forerunners of the movement. As proof that not everything during WWI was about death and destruction, he ran a publication that detailed the movement’s philosophy in the years before and after the war. He continually inspired Mondrian throughout his career.
Interpretation
In the early years of the century , physicists were at work formulating a fundamental new view of the universe, which resulted in the concepts pf space time and relativity. In the arts, meanwhile, new ways of seeing and listening were also being worked out. In Mon- drian’s opinion, a work of art should be constructed, and he approached a canvas with all the objectivity of a draftsman making a blue- print. The result of this pictorial engineering is the series of pure, 2D studies of space for which he is best known. His visual patterns have a repose that is based on precise balance of horizontal and vertical elements, and they appear clean to the point of being antiseptic. Neoplasticism: The New “pure plastic art” and attempt to create “universal beauty and the “aesthetic expression of oneself.”
Details
“The word ART no longer means anything to us. In it’s place we demand the construction of our environment in accordance with creative laws based upon a fixed principle. These laws, following those of economics, technique, sanitation, etc., are leading to a new plastic unity.” Don’t be confused by Mondrian’s use of the term “plastic.” He uses it to refer to the plastic arts—media such as sculp- ture, that molds three-dimensional form, or, in Mondrian’s case, painting on canvas.
