Composition with Color Planes and Gray Lines 1, 1918 3.
'Neo-Plasticism'
| An active interest in Theosophy was something shared by both Kandinsky and Mondrian. Their attraction to these mystical ideas was inseparable from their belief that colour and form could convey content independently of figurative representation. The belief in a universal unifying order which could be expressed, and connected with, through the fundamental aesthetic elements colour and form, defined both these artist paths to abstraction. However, this belief was experienced and expressed through their art in quite different ways. | Whereas Kandinsky set out to express ‘inner necessity’, Mondrain set out to record what might be called ‘external neccessity’. The whole purpose of his alternative principle was to escape from the internal necessities of our individual existence and to create a pure art, free from human tragedy, impersonal and universal. Mondrian was the painter who was to develop to its logical extreme the objective, rather than the subjective, concept of abstraction. |
| Mondrian, rather than employing colour as a vehicle for mystery, wanted to fully reveal it. In the words of his mentor Schoemmacker he wanted to "penetrate nature in such a way that the hidden construction of reality is revealed to us"1. After much experimentation and experience in the aesthetic languages of expressionism, neo-impressionism, and cubism, Mondrain defined his personal quest in art as the developement of what he called ‘Neo-plasticism’. This idea for an aesthetic language was based on Schoenmaeker’s neoplatonic system which he called ‘positive mysticism’ or ‘plastic mathematics’. Alongside the other De Stijl members Theo van Doesburg(1883-1931) and Bart van der Leck(1876-1928) Mondrian propagated his views on art and ideals of ‘Neo-plasticism’: "We now learn to translate reality in our imagination into constructions which can be controlled by reason, in order to recover these same constructions later "given" natural reality, thus penetrating nature by means of plastic vision"2. | |
| The debate between the members of De Stijl on how to approach colour, centred around their readings of the colour theories of Chevreul, Goethe and most importantly the contemporary theoretician Otswald. Chevreul provided one of the earliest formulations of the idea of colour as a universal language, but based his theory on the subjective experience of colour. Otswald, however, provided them with a more objective rationale of colour. In his search for the 'absolute' Mondrian, after much experimentation, arrived at the conception that mirrored the Dutch Theosophists Schoemmacker's ideas on the universal significance of the 'primaries'. In his book ‘Het Nieuwe Wereldbeeld’ (The New World Image, 1915) Schoenmacker argued that red, yellow and blue were the only colours, since all the others derived from them. Besant's and Leadbeater's book 'Thought Forms' (1901), published by the Theosophy society of which Mondrian became a member, clearly sets out that blue represented 'high spirituality', devotion to a noble ideal, and pure religious feeling, yellow represented the highest intellect, whilst red, depending on its purity could represent pride, anger or sensuality. | Composition with Color Planes and Gray Lines 1, 1918 3. |
 Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921 4. |
The extent to which Mondrian took aboard these
'characteristics of colours' is doubtful, however, it was the idea that colour could speak
of the 'absolute' which became central to his work. Theosophy and especially the work of
Schoemmacker provided Mondrain with an epistemological framework and a complete
philosophical justification for the abstract tendency of his painting. Mondrian, in his aim for purely plastic expression, searched for a method of completley dislocating and objectifying colour. He got as close as possible to doing this with the use of a grid. This method of painting or sticking squares or rectangles of pure colour on a white background was borrowed from experimental psychology and was the same technique used by Otswald to prepare his colour scales. One can see how this pictorial theory of colour developed in Mondrian's mind when comparing the paintings 'Composition with Colour Planes and Gray Line 1'(1918) and 'Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Gray'(1921). He arrived after much debate and experimentation at the quality of the primaries in the latter, which for him spoke most exactly of the purity he desired. He found universality in standardisation, these primaries became a permanent fixture in his 'compositions'. ‘Colour must be clearly delimited if it is to represent anything plastically.......The particular, which diverts us from what is essential, disappears; only the universal remains" 5. |
| The style of his paintings, after a long stretch of remaining much the same, changed at the end of his career with his abstract depictions of the life of New York City. During this time he developed his interest in the depiction of sound and movement. One of the styles of music which had a more than usual resonance for Mondrian was Jazz. His belief that rhythm was the unifying feature of art and life, whether musical or visual, was put forward in his essay 'Jazz and Neo-Plastic' published in 1927. However it was not until quite awhile later in New York when he turned his attentions fully on capturing music. |  Victory Boogie Woogie 1943/4 6. |
In New York the prevailing version of jazz was boogle woogie, a piano based style often using two instruments, whose staccato 'riffs' and runs up and down the keyboard gave it a sparkling and fragmented character which Mondrian, abandoning his black lines, picked up in the colouristic grid of his last paintings. In Victory Boogie Woogie 1943, the spirit of the music has been captured in the rhythmic colour formations.
|
1.Schoemmacker quoted in Reynolds p.37
2. From De Stijl journal, quoted in Reynolds p.38
3.Composition with Color Planes and Gray Lines 1, 1918, Oil on canvas, 49 x 60.5 cm (19 1/4 x 23 7/8 in), Private collection. Downloaded from www.artchive.com
4.Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921, Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 50 cm (23 3/4 x 19 5/8 in), Dallas Museum of Art. Downloaded from www.artchive.com
5. Art in Theory p.283, ‘Mondrian-‘Diaglogue on the New Plastic’1919.
6. Victory Boogie Woogie 1943/4.Oil on Canvas, 126x 126, Private collection. Scanned from Gage p.239