De Stijl: Mondrian's Neoplasticism & Primary Colors

Piet Mondrian's Composition: An Analysis

Table II: Details of the Artwork

Author: Mondrian, Piet

Dated: 1921 - 1925

Style: Neoplasticism

• Rejection of texture, surface, and light qualities.
• Reduced palette to primary colors.
• Flat surface must only contain planar elements.
• Removal of curved lines.
• Presence of straight lines.

Technique: Oil

Support: Canvas

Current Location: Max Bill collection in Zurich

Topic: Squares, Rectangles, and Primary Colors

Squares and rectangles of various sizes accommodate mass and bright primary colors, combining to form a closed fabric that meets the surface of the canvas.

Formal Elements

The composition is divided into colored zones of squares and rectangles, some larger than others, creating a structure that prints a great deal of dynamism to the whole. A sea with two blades crosses from superior left to bottom right and bottom left to top right, both through the center.

The rate is given by the colors, providing a dynamic distribution. The chromatic is low, based on the use of primary colors, white, and black. The painter plays with colors.

Interpretation

• Work Function: Almost purely aesthetic.
• Create a rational intellectual mental order.
• Religious, mystical, spiritual, and moral clarity explains the composition.
• Escape from everyday life to express the universal.

The role of the work is research and the exploration of new ways of expression, establishing and expressing a universal order and subsistence for the artist, for subsequent sale.

Content: Essence of Color and Shape

The subject matter is the primary colors, researching the colors, studying shapes and colors until you get to the essence.

• Significance: From an abstract work, no matter strictly. Waive figuration, because it expresses the universal.
• Stresses by:

• Legend in lines and colors, Theosophy (spiritualism).
• Elimination of subjectivity: it seeks to explain the essence of the realities of a balanced structure; feeling obfuscate; reflection allows perception.
• Aesthetic research, clear planning reflects the philosophy of Spinoza.
• It sees the domain of humanism on Nature.
• This is the Dutchman Puritanism: the absence of anecdotism.

Historical Context: The Age of -Isms

We are in the age of -isms, mid-twenties, at a time in which vanguards developed. Mondrian belonged to theosophists (theology and philosophy), who believed that the cosmos had a universal harmony, which they wanted to express in their works.

Conclusion

Change in construction and function of the artwork, commissioned works not: build a new pictorial language in the formal elements to reduce color, line, and composition.