Piet Mondrian
In the early 1900s many artists tried various abstract ways of representing reality. Piet Mondrian went beyond them. In his final compositions he avoided any suggestion of reproducing the material world. Instead using horizontal and vertical black lines that outline blocks of pure white, red, blue or yellow, he expressed his conception of ultimate harmony and equilibrium. Mondrian was born on March 7, 1872 in Amersfoort, The Netherlands. He studied at the Amsterdam Academy from 1892 to 1895 then began painting on his own. Most of his early works were landscapes. In 1909 he began a series of paintings of trees in which he developed an increasingly abstract style. He moved to Paris, about 1912, where he was influenced by the cubist painters. During World War I, Mondrian painted in The Netherlands. There he helped found De Stijl a magazine of the arts that influenced European painting, architecture, and design. He also began to formulate his own aesthetic theories. His style, and its underlying artistic principles, he called neoplasticism. The later paintings, which date from 1920 until his death, have simple titles, such as 'Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue' painted in 1926, and 'Composition in White, Black and Red' (1936).
The New Plastic in Painting', best expresses their ideas for a universal, elemental art divorced from the need to serve representation: `The new plastic art...can only be based on the abstraction of all form and colour, i.e. the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour'(Lemoine, 1987, p.29). One can conclude that this beautiful art work performed by Piet Mondian, is his expressions which are his life. We cannot exactly tell what this art form represents, but we can assume, it is his mind with perfect balance. The red represents some stress which is balanced with some other factor in his life . But in the end, Mondrian places everthing in a perfectly balanced order. Mondrain's evolution as an artist represents the origin and essence of De Stijl. Working to free painting completely from both the depiction of nameable objects and the expression of personal feelings, he developed and austre style baes on the expressive potential of fundamental visual elements and their relationships. He sought to create a new aesthetic that would provide a poetic vitality capable of setting standards of harmony for the new technological age (Preable, 439). `Neo-Plasticism'(a name by which de Stijl is alternately known) rejected figuration as the goal of art and replaced it with the pared-down vocabulary of elemental shapes and primary colours, thereby allowing art to express its own `plastic' language free of the concerns of representation. The artist in this environment became less author of a subjective artwork than the agent of a universal harmony. The depesonalisation of the artwork was carried through into
Some common words found in the essay are:
Piet Mondrian, De Stijl, Piet Mondrians, Plastic Painting', Piet Mondian, Amsterdam Academy, Europe York, Theosophical Society, Yellow Blue', American Jazz, black lines, red yellow, de stijl, composition red yellow, yellow blue', white black, red pushing, represent weight, red represents, formal elements, red yellow blue, red yellow blue', composition red,
Approximate Word count = 1097
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
