CategoriesStyles and Movements
Neo-Plasticism
Piet Mondrian's strict abstract language of black lines at right angles, primary colours and white, developed in the Netherlands and Paris from 1917.
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About
Piet Mondrian spent the 1910s stripping painting down, moving from trees and church façades through Cubism towards a pure, universal vocabulary. In essays for De Stijl, the journal Theo van Doesburg launched in 1917, he called it “nieuwe beelding”, the new plastic art, and in Paris he issued the pamphlet Le Néo-Plasticisme (1920). The rules were strict: straight lines meeting at right angles, the primaries red, yellow and blue, and the non-colours white, grey and black, held in asymmetrical equilibrium. Theosophy, a lasting interest, shaped his sense that such relations revealed a hidden order.
Seen in person, the whites vary in tone and brushwork. Van Doesburg's adoption of diagonals in the mid-1920s caused a rift. Gerrit Rietveld built the ideas into furniture and the Schröder House (1924), and in New York, where Mondrian painted Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), Fritz Glarner and Ilya Bolotowsky took them further.
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