Enlightenment of Modern Architecture! 7 Pieces of Piet Mondrian's Neo-Plastic Art

An influential non-representational painter, Piet Mondrian’s art evolved over his lifetime into his own unique style, which he coined “neo-plasticism.” This art was not based on outside artistic influences or on typical techniques, but was instead Mondrian’s interpretation of his deeply felt philosophical beliefs. He subscribed to two sets of philosophical beliefs; theosophy, a religious mysticism which sought to help humanity achieve perfection, and anthroposophy, which held that the spiritual world was directly accessible through the development of the inner self. His works were thus aimed at helping humanity through aesthetic beauty and breaking from a representational form of painting. He published his explanation of neo-plasticism in his art publication De Stijl (The Style) in 1917 and 1918.

Although his early work was representational, he slowly developed his artistic philosophy, his works slowly devolving first into cubism, then to pure abstraction and non-representation. After WWI, he flourished in the post-war atmosphere of Paris, which allowed him pure creative freedom. Upon the outbreak of WWII, and the approach of fascism, he moved to Manhattan, NY, where he spent the rest of his life. It was in his Manhattan studio where he felt most creative, and in which he created his great masterpieces.

Mondrian was an avid painter and would paint until his hands blistered. Sometimes he made himself sick, and others he made himself cry from exhaustion. While in his Manhattan apartment, he rearranged large colored panels on his walls, and painted other portions, rearranging and moving the panels as he completed his canvas paintings, or as he completed periods of painting. He later said that his ever-changing surroundings in his Manhattan studio were the best space he ever inhabited. After his death, his friend Harry Holtzman carefully measured each of the panels on Mondrian’s walls and turned them into a traveling exhibition called Wall Works.

1. Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue

In this Composition with red, yellow and blue, Mondriaan again seeks a balance. The large, white area in this canvas creates a point of rest. However, because it is not centrally placed and is surrounded by the three coloured areas, the composition appears anything but static. It is not limited by the size of the canvas, whereby the painting seems to continue beyond its boundaries.

2. Composition C

Mondrian began working around the very beginning of the 20th century, and his work appears to have been influenced by the Impressionism, and the bold use of colour employed by fauvist painters like Henri Matisse and Gauguin. Prior to the First World War, Mondrian's work was still fairly representational, but it already showed hints of the abstraction for which he would become best known. But it was the outbreak of war which seemed to change Mondrian's work forever. And Composition C (No. III) is a good example of how he responded to the political and social consequences of the war through his work.

3. Composition London

Composition London is a typical example of the pictures that Mondrian conceived shortly before he left England and completed in New York. It is dated, at the lower right, 40/42, and from this can be identified as the painting exhibited as No. 11 in Mondrian's first one-man show in New York in 1942. The changes he made in New York are all of the same sort: to compositions closely related to the canvases of 1936 and later, Mondrian added small, free-standing, unbounded areas of color. These colored areas give the whole a new vivacity; they break the strict, almost somber aspect of the pictures of the late thirties and introduce a new, lively, sparkling rhythm anticipatory of such works as Broadway Boogie-Woogie and revealing the same inspiration. The influence of the thirties remains, however, in the strongly asymmetric composition, with a concentration of accents primarily on the right. This asymmetry was to give way in New York to another, highly rhythmic compositional structure.

4.New York City I

New York City I, or rather the series of works later brought together under the title New York City, marks the beginning of a new phase in Mondrian's work. The black lines have disappeared along with the rectangles of primary color, which since the 1918 Composition: Color Planes with Gray Contours had formed a solid flat totality with the lines and the white that had previously been the background. Instead, lines in the primary colors - yellow, but also red and blue - traverse the square canvas, interweaving with each other.

For the most part, the yellow lines cross those of the other colors, but here and there, in a most subtle way, the red and blue lines cross the yellow. Yet this style does not give rise to an illusionary space; the colored bands over- and underlap one another on the surface, before the eyes of the viewer. It is quite reasonable to accept Michel Seuphor's suggestion and attribute this effect of crossing and interlacing to Mondrian's method of conceiving and working out these pictures: he used strips of colored paper and moved them about on the canvas to get the effect he wanted. In this way, he almost automatically introduced the crossovers and the suggestion of interwoven colored bands.

5. Broadway Boogie-Woogie

Broadway Boogie-Woogie is the last painting Mondrian completed. In the early phases of its genesis, the two 1942 drawings in the Newman Collection, it still shows many points of coincidence with the painting preceded it, New York City I. In the preliminary studies rhythm of the painting is determined by the long lines of the grid, while other accents indicate the insertion of little bands of unbounded color, characteristic of the enlivening alterations that Mondrian made in New York on the paintings of his last years in Europe. One example of a painting so changed is Composition London, which in its present state - that is, after the changes Mondrian made on it in New York - must be roughly contemporaneous with the Broadway Boogie-Woogie sketches.

6. Victory Boogie-Woogie

Victory Boogie-Woogie, a painting that Mondrian conceived in expectation of victory in World War II and that remained unfinished by reason of his death on February 1, 1944, adds immeasurably to the innovations of his American period. Even in its half-finished state, the painting shows an enormous enrichment over the 1943 drawing containing a first design for the work. It is remarkable to see how Mondrian, already over seventy, was capable of a liveliness, a receptivity to new impressions, a suppleness in dealing with his own approach - all sharply in contradiction to the reputation for dogmatism that surrounded him and that he had himself furthered in the years after 1925, in his dialectic controversy with Theo van Doesburg. Modrian was not doctrinaire in any sense of the term, but he did go constantly further on his own way, and the changes that took place in his work were not deviations from a dogmatic policy but consequences of the insights and experiences deriving from his eyes and his "thinking with his eyes," as Paul Cezanne put it. Victory Boogie-Woogie is a fascinating and convincing example of this development.

7. Trafalgar Square

In September 1938 Mondrian moved from Paris to London to escape the threat of a German invasion. There he made Trafalgar Square, the first in a series of paintings titled after locations in cities that gave him refuge during World War II. The small, subtly textured planes of primary colors that seem to vibrate within their black perimeters are smaller and their arrangement more syncopated than in many of the artist's earlier canvases: color segments expand across two rectangular fields in the larger black grid, and thickened blocks of black function as both line and plane (at lower right, for example). The date "39–43" inscribed on the original canvas stretcher suggests that Mondrian revisited this painting after his flight to New York in 1940 to escape the escalating war.