Röd blus ellos
Blue.
Masterpiece Story: Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow by Piet Mondrian
Blues are, in a word, perfectionists. But if you’re a blue, you already knew this. This type of personality leans toward examining the smallest detail of every situation and frets about each one of them not going according to plan. The person with a blue personality often appeals emotionless from the outside looking in. Pure abstract art becomes completely emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances. The canvas is small and uses only the simplest of colors: red, blue, yellow, white and black.
The composition is similarly reduced to the simplest of rectilinear forms, squares and rectangles defined by vertical and horizontal lines. In contrast, Mondrian and other modernists wanted to move painting beyond naturalistic depiction to focus instead on the material properties of paint and its unique ability to express ideas abstractly using formal elements such as line and color. Mondrian believed his abstraction could serve as a universal pictorial language representing the dynamic, evolutionary forces that govern nature and human experience.
In fact, he believed that abstraction provides a truer picture of reality than illusionistic depictions of objects in the visible world. He studied at the art academies in the Hague and in Amsterdam in his home country of the Netherlands. Then, as with many artists during the early twentieth century, he began to emulate a variety of contemporary styles, including Impressionism , Neo-Impressionism , and Symbolism in an effort to find his own artistic voice.
His emphasis on line, color, and geometric shape sought to highlight formal characteristics. Mondrian was inspired by Cubism , a movement led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque that explored the use of multiple perspectives. Mondrian began experimenting with abstracted forms around the time he moved to Paris in Because Mondrian continued to rely on the series throughout his career, we can see the progression of his pictorial language even in his later, purely abstract work.
Mondrian had returned home to the Netherlands just prior to the outbreak of the First World War and would remain there until the war ended. While in the Netherlands he further developed his style, ruling out compositions that were either too static or too dynamic, concluding that asymmetrical arrangements of geometric rather than organic shapes in primary rather than secondary colors best represent universal forces.
For Mondrian then, composing with opposites such as black and white pigments or vertical and horizontal lines suggest an evolutionary development. Theosophists were interested in opposites as an expression of hidden unity. He lived near M. In Theosophy , lines, shapes, and colors symbolized the unity of spiritual and natural forces. The two shared many ideas about art as an expression of relationships, particularly the relationships between art and life.
Because these artists believed that the evolution of art coincided with the modern progression of humankind, they thought that New Plasticism could, and should, encompass all of human experience. Van Doesburg founded the journal De Stijl to promote these ideas and demonstrate that their geometric abstraction, based on their theory of spiritual and pictorial progress, could form a total environment, and impact modern life.
Although Mondrian and van Doesburg eventually parted ways, their movement to combine modern art and living was so influential that the abstract, geometric principles and use of primary colors they applied in painting, sculpture, design, and architecture still resonate today. Mondrian composed this painting as a harmony of contrasts that signify both balance and the tension of dynamic forces.
Mondrian viewed his black lines not as outlines but as planes of pigment in their own right; an idea seen in the horizontal black plane on the lower right of the painting that stops just short of the canvas edge see image above.
4 Color Personality Test
Mondrian eradicates the entire notion of illusionistic depth predicated on a figure in front of a background. He achieves a harmonious tension by his asymmetrical placement of primary colors that balance the blocks of white paint. Notice how the large red square at the upper right, which might otherwise dominate the composition, is balanced by the small blue square at the bottom left. Seen up close, this variety of values and textures create a surprising harmony of contrasts.
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