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Piet Mondrian,
one of the principle artists responsible for twentieth-century non-objective
painting, was born in Amersfoort, Holland. He studied at the Amsterdam
Academy and began his career by painting landscapes which owe a debt
to seventieth-century Dutch art, to Impressionism and later, by 1908,
to Expressionism. |
From
1911 to 1914 Mondrian lived in Paris where his close contact with
Cubist ideas
reinforced his path from naturalism to abstraction. Cubist faceted
planes appear in his work of 1912 to 1914, yet the picture space is
already narrower and more frontal. In 1917 he was among the founding
members of the De Stijl group in Holland, whose goal was to create
a universal art independent of individual emotions by setting out
such general aesthetic criteria as: form restricted to the rectangle,
color limited to the primaries (red, yellow, blue) and to black, white
and gray and composition formed from perpendicular planes asymmetrically
arranged. Characteristic of Mondrian's work, these principles were
later elaborated upon in his treatise on Neo-Plasticism published
in 1921. To Mondrian the world of the picture was its own truth-its
own "plastic" reality. Color, line, form, composition, and rhythm,
independent of natural appearances and personal emotions, reveal a
cosmic order. This order in art brought man in balance and with universe,
his only chance to overcome human suffering and unhappiness. Mondrian
painted in Holland, Paris and London until 1940 when he moved to New
York, living there until his death in 1944. In New York he painted
the famous work Broadway Boogie Woogie which shows a modification
of his acetic vision, yet still retains his highly disciplined style
of; primary colors and vertical and horizontal bands. In response
to the beat of jazz, the pulsations of neon signs and the fast city
pace, the painting's rhythms are stepped up by increasing the number
of small rectangular forms and color blocks.
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