Piet Mondrian and the six lines that made a masterpiece
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- 13 Jul 2022
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Six lines and five colours was all it took to make a masterpiece. By 1922, the modernist mission appeared to be complete. In Piet Mondrian's Composition with Blue, Yellow, Red, Black and Grey, only primary colours prevail. The orange and cornflower blue that lingered the previous year had been banished from the grid, and a contemplative grey-white took centre stage. Western art had never seemed so simple or so accessible.
Maurice Rummens, academic researcher at the Stedelijk Museum, describes the painting as "one of the spearheads" of the museum's collection. It signalled a transformation in Mondrian's style – and in painting. Representations of real objects and the use of perspective, seen in the artist's landscapes at the turn of the century and continuing into his cubist period, were no longer modern enough for him. Instead, he turned to pure abstraction to communicate something more ambitious and intangible: the elementary and universal qualities of the cosmos.
"Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces," Mondrian later explained in a 1937 essay. "They exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes 'life'."
Mondrian was a trailblazer, in his concentration on the very essence of the image – he was one of the first who really did this, this totally non-representational work – Ulf Küster
Mondrian intended the combination of primary colours and bold geometric patterns to convey nature's inherent connectivity in the most distilled and direct way possible. In a letter to fellow Dutch artist Theo Van Doesburg in 1915, he writes: "I always confine myself to expressing the eternal (closest to the spirit) and I do so in the simplest of external forms, in order to be able to express the inner meaning as lightly veiled as possible."
"Mondrian was a trailblazer, in the sense that he was very radical, and in his concentration on the very essence of the image," says Ulf Küster, curator of Mondrian Evolution, an exploration of Mondrian's modernist journey currently showing at the Foundation Beyeler in Switzerland to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth.
"Minimalism is unthinkable without Mondrian," he told BBC Culture. "He was one of the first who really did this, this totally non-representational work… If you see modern as something which breaks with all traditions and defines everything new, then Mondrian's paintings of the 20s are very, very modern."
Hints of the revolutionary work that was to come nevertheless reveal themselves in Mondrian's earlier pieces. The artist's interest in grids, bold lines and right-angled compositions, for example, can be seen in landscapes where tree trunks slice the horizon (1902/3) or the numerous studies he made of a fenced meadow in 1905.
By 1922, Mondrian had adopted the principles of neoplasticism, an art movement also known as De Stijl which included Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Gerrit Rietveld, and Bart van der Leck among its leading members, and which advocated for pure, reductive compositions that were perfectly balanced. Mondrian disapproved of Van der Leck's use of background and foreground, and opposed Van Doesburg and Van der Leck's use of the diagonal – a determination to take the aesthetic all the way that created the iconic images he is known for today. Read More...
