Text by Hans Janssen, Franz-W. Kaiser, Matthias Mühling, Felicia Rappe.
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) emptied Cubism of its representational content, dissembling its angular contours into a few floating horizontal lines and reconstructing it anew as irregular squares of primary color. Mondrian dubbed the abstract style at which he arrived Neoplasticism, a term that eventually became synonymous with De Stijl, the Dutch avant-garde group composed of artists Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Vilmos Huszar and the architects Gerrit Rietveld, Robert van 't Hoff and J.J.P. Oud, as well as Mondrian himself. More influential and foundational than any other design ethos of the early twentieth century, De Stijl provided the basis for much of the Bauhaus aesthetic, as well as Concrete art and the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. Collectively, the movement can be said to have translated Mondrian's pure painting into applied design for clothing, furniture (most famously Rietveld's Red and Blue chair), interiors, houses, blocks of flats and even whole towns. This volume looks at the full arc of Mondrian's evolution, from his early works executed in Neoimpressionist and Luminist idioms to his arrival at a pure Neoplastic abstraction, and traces De Stijl's extrapolations of Mondrian's art into a multidisciplinary utopian design project.
"Even the uninitiated can easily grasp Mondrian's direct path to abstraction, simply on the basis of its visual logic. While Mondrian prioritized intuitive working methods and experience in his work, he was fully aware of the rationality inherent in his artistic project. Using the analytic potential of Cubism to dismantle an object's appearance and, as it were, to unfold It onto the planar canvas, he destroyed the traditional illusion of depth and simultaneously restructured the picture surface. These reductionist modes of structuring prefigured in Cubism persisted right into Mondrian's abstract painting. Nine years later, they issued in what he called Neoplasticism. As with Kandinsky, pictorial elements such as line, color, shape, and plane received their own values without having to refer to anything else. Mondrian further subjected them to extreme reduction: only straight vertical or horizontal lines, no diagonals, only primary colors, no non-primary colors as found in nature, and otherwise only the non-colors black, white, and gray. He employed this highly reduced system of pictorial elements as a framework offering little room for variation, rather like a scientific experiment where most of the variables are fixed so that one or two others can be studied. In this sense, one can view Mondrian's Neoplasticism as a sort of laboratory experiment for investigating universal harmony."
Franz-W. Kaiser, excerpted from On 'Meaning' in Abstract ArtMondrian De Stijl.
FORMAT: Hbk, 8 x 10 in. / 304 pgs / 126 color / 41 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $70 ISBN: 9783775730235 PUBLISHER: Hatje Cantz AVAILABLE: 8/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA
Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Hans Janssen, Franz-W. Kaiser, Matthias Mühling, Felicia Rappe.
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) emptied Cubism of its representational content, dissembling its angular contours into a few floating horizontal lines and reconstructing it anew as irregular squares of primary color. Mondrian dubbed the abstract style at which he arrived Neoplasticism, a term that eventually became synonymous with De Stijl, the Dutch avant-garde group composed of artists Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Vilmos Huszar and the architects Gerrit Rietveld, Robert van 't Hoff and J.J.P. Oud, as well as Mondrian himself. More influential and foundational than any other design ethos of the early twentieth century, De Stijl provided the basis for much of the Bauhaus aesthetic, as well as Concrete art and the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. Collectively, the movement can be said to have translated Mondrian's pure painting into applied design for clothing, furniture (most famously Rietveld's Red and Blue chair), interiors, houses, blocks of flats and even whole towns. This volume looks at the full arc of Mondrian's evolution, from his early works executed in Neoimpressionist and Luminist idioms to his arrival at a pure Neoplastic abstraction, and traces De Stijl's extrapolations of Mondrian's art into a multidisciplinary utopian design project.
