Piet Mondrian: Art, De Stijl, and Neoplasticism
Historical Context
World War I (1914-1918) significantly impacted the art world, leading to a return to naturalism in some artists, such as Picasso. This period also saw the rise of several influential art movements:
- Dada Movement: Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia were key figures in this anti-establishment movement.
- Metaphysical Painting: Giorgio de Chirico was a prominent figure, and Marc Chagall was influenced by this style.
- Constructivism: This movement emerged in opposition to Dadaism, emphasizing geometric abstraction.
Piet Mondrian’s Artistic Evolution
Mondrian’s early works were serene landscapes painted in delicate grays, mauves, and dark greens. In 1908, influenced by painter Jan Toorop, he began experimenting with brighter colors. In 1911, he moved to Paris and adopted the Cubist style, gradually transitioning towards abstraction.
In 1917, Mondrian co-founded the magazine De Stijl with painter Theo van Doesburg and a group of young architects and artists. Until 1924, De Stijl served as a platform for spreading Neoplasticism, an art form detached from nature, seeking to represent the universe’s absolute truths. Mondrian’s painting would subsequently be expressed exclusively through a few straight lines and planes of primary colors.
In 1925, he left the De Stijl group and, in 1931, joined the Abstraction-Création group led by Auguste Herbin. In 1938, he emigrated to London. In the autumn of 1940, after the London bombings and the German entry into Paris, Mondrian accepted an invitation from American artist Harry Holtzman and settled in New York. In America, his style lost some rigidity and acquired greater freedom and a livelier pace.
Importance of Mondrian’s Work
Piet Mondrian, the foremost representative of Dutch Neoplasticism, proposed a new geometric ordering of the world based on reason and concrete theoretical and practical models, contrasting the destructive irrationality of World War I. He consistently reduced the elements of his artwork to vertical and horizontal lines and the three primary colors (yellow, blue, and red), forming the basis of his formal grammar. His work is characterized by the elemental, rational, and functional nature of forms.
Mondrian rigorously adhered to primary structural values of line, drawing, and color. He criticized Cubism for its irrationality, arguing that analysis should lead to synthesis. Due to his philosophical and religious interests, Mondrian critiqued Cartesian Cubism from a Spinozist perspective, asserting that the mind’s constitution is universal and should be based on shared ideas.
All of Mondrian’s paintings share a common approach to lines, planes, and fundamental colors. His works created between 1920 and 1940 are remarkably similar, featuring an ordered lattice of boxes in different primary colors, predominantly white (representing light).
A Mondrian painting is a surface with few colors: the pictorial display of the Impressionists, which the Cubists had transformed into a plastic screen, is further reduced. He transforms the surface (empirical) into a plane (mathematical entity). By dividing the surface through vertical and horizontal coordinates at a metric rate, he resolves everything in nature given as width and height. There is only what is given in the third dimension, which are the infinite sensations that vary depending on local color, distance, and light.
The black lines have a specific function: without them, the colors, as Mondrian understood them, would influence each other. These lines establish metric power relations, evaluated not by the senses but by the mind. Mondrian demonstrates that the perception of color changes with the extent of the area covered and its form. He also shows that two areas of different sizes can have the same value when the difference in size is offset by varying tonal depths.
Mondrian’s moral stance was to eliminate the tragic aspect of life, which he associated with the unconscious, as seen in Expressionism, Surrealism, Matisse’s joy of life, and Picasso’s deformations. For Mondrian, the artist has no right to influence the viewer emotionally; if he discovers a truth, he must show how he arrived at it. Aware of the artist’s cultural responsibility, he envisioned painting as a project for social life.
Despite the deliberate coldness of his work, Mondrian, following Cézanne, possessed a highly lucid and cultivated awareness of modern art history.
Tableau II by Piet Mondrian
Style and Era: De Stijl. Piet Mondrian’s name is linked to the Dutch Neo-plasticism group that coalesced around the journal De Stijl.
Technique: Oil on canvas
Title: Composition II
Author: Piet Mondrian
Meaning and Function of the Work
All of Mondrian’s paintings between 1920 and 1940 resemble each other: a grid of thick black lines forming boxes of different sizes containing primary colors (blue, red, and yellow) along with white (light) and black (absence of light). Each of them depends on a perceptive sensation and, therefore, is sensory, emotional, and different.
His 1927 Composition is a surface impressed with a few colors—white, black, yellow, and blue—separated by straight black lines. These lines isolate the colors, preventing their mutual influence. Subdividing the surface by vertical and horizontal coordinates, with a metric ratio, resolves everything in nature that appears as height and width. There are as many color variations as there are numbers.
Style and Most Characteristic Elements
After Cézanne and the Cubist experience of Picasso, the subsequent step was clear: non-figuration. Mondrian came into contact with Cubism in Paris in 1911, thereafter subjecting nature to a process leading to abstraction. The movement aims to reach its ultimate consequences—the purity of the plastic—and it defends the exclusive use of the line, plane, the three primary colors (blue, red, and yellow), and non-colors (white, black, gray). It seeks harmony between space, form, and color.
Geometric abstraction presents the following characteristics: the use of geometric shapes, with a clear predominance of straight lines; the absence of any reference to pictures of nature; the use of pure colors and drawings; and an approach to art as a social function.
Iconography
Red (hot) and blue (cold) are the terms of registration of variations. Yellow gives maximum brightness to the picture. The assessment of the perceived color changes according to the extent of the area covered or its form (different rectangles with horizontal or vertical orientation). It also shows that two areas with different extensions have the same value if the difference is offset by varying gradations of tonality. The perfect ratio is achieved when all values of the system are balanced to form a flat geometric plane. It looks, and in some ways is, a mathematical operation.
Mondrian’s moral approach is to eliminate the tragedy of life, which is all that comes from the unconscious, the complex of guilt and power, of superiority or inferiority. For Mondrian, the artist has no right to influence the viewer emotionally; if he can discover a truth, he has the right to show how he arrived at it, and if he can show it, he has a duty to share that truth.
Mondrian’s painting envisions a utopian society without contradictions, a society that can solve its contradictions with reason and without recourse to violence. Similarly, his painting is framed in perfect urban planning; the city he longs for is the living space of a society whose acts, being a pure product of consciousness in its unity, are at once rational, moral, and ethical. It is not surprising that his ideas profoundly influenced architecture, particularly in assessing the vital functionality of spaces.
Therefore, despite the deliberate coldness of his paintings, Mondrian possessed, after Cézanne, the highest, sharpest, and most civil consciousness in the history of modern art.
For Mondrian, in his compositions, vertical lines represent the male element, and horizontal lines represent the feminine. From color and mathematics, from the rectangles, the painter must create beauty, balance, and harmony. The size of the rectangles and the visual weight of the colors are the basic and sufficient elements to produce the most schematic composition possible with a measured pace.