The members of the De Stijl movement were pious, self-effacing artists bent on creating pure and accessible art. Although the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian did not himself organize the groups with which he is associated -- De Stijl, Cercle et Carr'...
[more]The members of the De Stijl movement were pious, self-effacing artists bent on creating pure and accessible art. Although the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian did not himself organize the groups with which he is associated -- De Stijl, Cercle et Carr' (Circle and Square), and Abstraction-Cr'ation -- his participation was essential to the growth of abstraction.
Early in his career Mondrian worked in the naturalist style, but moved slowly toward innovations in color and abstraction. From the Impressionist and Pointillist-style landscapes and still lifes, composed around 1906, Mondrian's aesthetic quickly evolved into free, Fauvist-style landscapes. A 1909 Amsterdam exhibition of these raw landscapes was fiercely criticized, but Mondrian continued to develop his style with an eye toward innovation. By 1911, he had moved to Paris and launched himself into Cubism.
Mondrian's shift toward greater abstraction was inspired by a desire to express universals. Eliminating the real and visible from his paintings, he extracted pure form and color from the objective world. His aesthetic philosophy is, unsurprisingly, as distilled as his paintings: "What do I want to express with my work? Nothing else than that which every other artist seeks: to achieve harmony through the balance of the relationships between lines, colors, and planes. But only in the clearest and strongest way."
Mondrian articulated his philosophy in a series of articles on "The New Structuring of Painting" in the De Stijl magazine published by Theo Van Doesburg. Van Doesburg and Mondrian were the theoretical engines behind De Stijl, whose artists strove for anonymity and envisioned a collective art. They felt their philosophy was confirmed by modern developments like the perfection of the machine, the move toward collective housing, and the anonymity of the industrial process. For Mondrian, the tensions between modern technology and individuality were more a matter of perception than reality, and he believed that the move from the particular to the abstract was the way to bring together these two apparent opposites.
Mondrian composed his first plus-minus compositions -- paintings with rhythmic horizontal and vertical lines -- in 1917, and by 1918 he had created his first geometric grid works. But it was not until 1920, after the publication of his treatise "Le Neo Plasticisme" (Neo-Plasticism), that he composed the first heavily black-outlined colored rectangles. Mondrian never viewed the black lines as edges: they weren't meant to contain the colors, since doing so would create foreground and background and thus interfere with the total unity of the work. Instead, the lines moved through the rectangles of color while remaining independent of them. Overtly basic compositions of color and line, these paintings emphasize the dynamic interaction of the essential elements of form and color.
In 1921, Mondrian further reduced his palette to three pure primary colors plus black, white, and gray. After his 1940 emigration to New York, the painter made his final stylistic refinement, changing to a framework of black lines replaced by colored lines and rows of small colorful rectangles. "Broadway Boogie Woogie," painted just prior to Mondrian's death in 1944, created a splash, serving as a catalyst for the American abstractionists of the '50s and '60s.
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