Mondrian and Plastic Expression

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan was born in Amersfoort in the Netherlands in 1872 and began his artistic life as a trained painter of conventional landscapes. During his early years he visited Paris (1911-14, where he altered the spelling of his name to Piet Mondrian), coming under the influences of contemporary movements in painting, especially Cubism. These influences may be observed in the landscapes he produced on his return to the Netherlands, becoming larger, initially much brighter (Fauvism) and ultimately, abstract. He returned to Paris after the First World War and remained there until 1938 when he moved briefly to London before sailing in September 1940 to the United States, where he died in 1944. His mature and 'typical' work became known all over the Western world, fairly quickly entering mainstream popular culture in various forms but especially in industrial and fashion design.

Photo: Wiki Commons: Mondriaanmode door Yves St Laurent (1966)

In any discussion of the work of the Dutch master the word 'plastic' will arise, if for no other reason than that Mondrian himself used this word, in various forms in his own writings, notably for two art magazines, namely, Cahiers d'Art (French) and De Stijl (Dutch). In his response published in Cahiers d'Art of January, 1931, to criticism that his 'new-plastic' painting (and abstract art in general) was decorative ('purement ornementales') and geometric ('de dessins géométriques'), Mondrian claimed that Cubism had had an enormous value, having introduced into painting purely plastic elements and new technique. Neo-plasticism 'evolved' to some extent out of Cubism and Purism, both of which Mondrian defines with the term 'morphoplastique'. According to Mondrian, the freeing of artistic space from the limitations of natural form (which includes incidentally, Renaissance perspective) led him to make the further abstraction towards the essential spiritual rhythm of life itself, that is, freed from the limiting forms (la forme limitée) of physical life.

The word 'plastic' comes from the Greek πλαστικος, from πλαστος, meaning formed, modelled or moulded. The term 'plastic expression' has been used since at least the early 20th century, to discuss an artist's use and manipulation of his or her materials and the way that contributes to his or her expression; it can refer as much as anything to an artist's use of paint for example, seen as somewhat independent of the subject of the given work. Since the beginning of the last century however, 'plastic expression' has been applied as well to abstract art, as it is in fact by Mondrian; the term as he used it referred to the 'purified' expression in art of abstract concepts, negating thereby any and all references to the visible, tactile world. Given all this, let's look at some of the expressions used by Mondrian in his various exegeses of his painting, and of the movement (De Stijl) he helped to found in the Netherlands:

- 'la plastique naturelle' signifies art which aims at the imitation or representation of nature, of physical reality

- 'morphoplastique' signifies art dependent on forms derived from nature (e.g. Cubism and Purism)

- 'le néo-plasticisme' or 'la plastique nouvelle' signifies an art liberated from (arbitrary) form, that is to say, a type of abstraction; he also spoke of 'la form limitée' by which he meant forms limited by outlines and contours (e.g. Renaissance forms) imitating the 'forms' of natural objects.

In 'Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (Figurative Art and Non-figurative Art)', [abbrev.: PA&PPA]1, Mondrian talks about 'the direct creation of universal beauty' as one driver in the creation of artwork, and 'the aesthetic expression of oneself' as the other. These two aspects, described as 'two opposing elements' were, according to him, until the advent of non-objective art, in an unbalanced state, with the latter element (aesthetic or plastic self-expression) dominant and therefore, skewing the effect of images too much towards the subjective. His goal was to unite these two qualities, seen as nevertheless essential, so as to create 'universal beauty' and avoid the contingent aspect of so much (Western) art.

To create the new relationships needed for this, he advocated 'neutral' means: technically speaking, a reduction or synthesis of existing techniques and content to 'neutral' geometric forms which, to a large extent, did away with a too heavy dose of the artist's particular viewpoint2.'Geometrical shapes' now seems like a pretty wide term for what Mondrian had in mind since, as we may deduce from his writings, geometric shapes per se were not the aim of his 'purified' painting, but were in fact, at least as much 'mechanical' by-products of the necessary straight line. Geometric shapes or forms were not an end in themselves but rather, an objective substitute for what he viewed as the 'subjective' forms of so much art (in PA&PPA, Mondrian says: "... it has established it through free lines which intersect and appear to form rectangles." [my italics]).

Piet Mondrian. Painting No. 9. 1939-42

The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

When he put several of those straight lines together, intersecting at right angles, he created thereby, geometric figures (or forms): naturally, the square and the rectangle, but also the triangle and the polygon (specifically, in his so-called 'lozenge' [French: losange] or 'diamond' pictures, see below); again in PA&PPA, Mondrian had claimed "... that forms create relations and that relations create forms". So, where one might think initially of Mondrian's straight lines, actually, by definition - once he had decided on the rectilinear grid - we must think of his squares and rectangles, and triangles, too! In fact, if one imagines a 'typical' Mondrian, two things occur in the mind's eye immediately and simultaneously, and those are his black lines and his coloured rectangles - and particularly his three primary colours.

Piet Mondrian. Tableau No IV; 

Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow and Black

c. 1924-25. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

But, whereas there is the 'typical' Mondrian of the imagination, when we look at his pictures, we discover a seemingly endless series of permutations of those basic elements: the length and width, and the number of the black lines - and even the density of the black paint; the multiple variations of size and position of the lines and the three primaries; the often ignored but quite common black rectangles or triangles mixed with the sometimes almost secondary, sometimes quite dominant role of the whites; the subtly supportive role of the greys; those numerous combinations of apparently simple elements produced an extraordinary number of manipulations of his basic themes. And one especial variation which he made his own: the turning of the canvas 45 degrees to produce, on the wall, a 'lozenge' or 'diamond' shape3, an innovation dating at least as far back as 1918 (Composition avec grille 3 or Composition dans le losange, 1918).

This gave the picture a very particular dynamism as the edges of the field (canvas) then took on an active role in the 'movement' of the image; in an odd way, these 'diamond' pictures therefore had four extra, but functioning straight lines, that is, in their de facto job of creating triangles and polygons. This point itself is interesting in light of the story that Mondrian split with his collaborator on 'De Stijl', Theo Van Doesburg, over his (Thoe's) use of diagonals: even in Mondrian's pictures, at least one side of a triangle is, of course, a diagonal!

Although a relatively small number of elements was used over and over again in Mondrian's oeuvre, even a casual survey of his work from about 1912 onwards will show how he sought to find and refine the essential in his image-making. Once he had chosen his tools so to speak, for constructing his pictures - he said in PA&PPA that: "The work of art must be 'produced', 'constructed' ..." - he continually honed them until his mature works glowed with a quiet, spare elegance recognised as 'beauty' of the type normally seen in the late paintings of masters. In relation to this idea of 'constructing' pictures, I recently became aware of a very interesting poem, published in Italian in 1509, by Francesco Lancilotti, in which he uses the words "esser constructo", which mean 'to be constructed', in talking about how a good painter should go about his work. So, even in the 16th century, the concept of 'constructing' paintings, like constructing buildings, was apparently current4.

Piet Mondrian. Victory Boogie Woogie, 1944

Oil and paper on canvas; diagonal measurement: 178.4 cm

Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, Netherlands

Interestingly, after his move to New York, Mondrian abandoned the black line, substituting for it first, whole coloured lines (e.g. New York City, 1942), and eventually, in Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie, small flashes of now-on, now-off colours, still his original primaries, but now as active as neon lights in the centre of NY City; gone was the dominant, enclosing and defining black line and, in it's place, a joyful, almost ecstatic rhythm of lights, which incidentally, no longer wanted to stay on the surface of the canvas: they wanted to jump back and forth into 'our' space, picking up a theme he had touched on many years earlier in Composition with Colours A and Composition with Colours B of 1917! Coincidentally, also in those last-named pictures, the black lines were very short - a kind of floating anchor for the colours; in Victory Boogie Woogie once again, what remains of black lines is short vestiges (reminiscent in a way of much earlier images, such as Composition 10 en noir et blanc, 1915), utterly overwhelmed by the pulsating colour of both 'lines' and, by this time, much smaller but liberated planes.

One could almost say that Mondrian discovered that his black lines had been a sort of psychological safety-rail for him: he controlled them and they controlled his images. In New York he danced - literally - and continued to listen to jazz (something he was already aware of in Paris in 1931: "... on le comprend un peu en écoutant le «jazz américain» ... ") and this and the city meant he no longer needed his safety-rail: he could now dance instead of walk on his canvas! In this context, we can have a look at some aspects of line, especially as they pertain to Mondrian.

Mondrian is known to have been influenced by Theosophical ideas early in his career; many today would scoff at such notions as Theosophy but, again, the significant thing is not whether those ideas, or others, were right or wrong, daft or otherwise: the point for us is that artists are influenced by the philosophical currents around them, and it is what they, the artists, produce as a result that matters. This matters because what we see in the gallery or on the wall at home, is the complete, discrete world of a particular painting; in two or three hundred years, what will speak to the viewer is that thing on the wall and it will do that if it is successful in its own terms. The didactic function of a knowledge of art theory (and history) naturally leads to a substantially fuller comprehension, but to a large extent, the first impact of a work of art is independent of theory. 

At the time Mondrian was developing his own ideas about art, the scientific concept of Space-Time was much discussed, also by artists. For some, it pointed the way to a break, more or less complete, with the old ways of making art, and suggested that the canvas itself was no longer necessary. In any case, in light of Einstein's discoveries, Space-Time was a topic of discussion, however badly understood it may have been! What is important here is that this concept and the questions around it, stimulated certain artists to search for new ways to make art, and for new ways to explain what they were doing. That said, I would like to ask a question: is it possible that line 'represented' the 'Time' element in Mondrian's typical works? In some, the lines do not reach the edge of the field, but a basically black line leads the eye in one direction or the other: this is movement and movement implies Time.

If the larger planes and areas - as opposed to lines - can be seen as 'Space', could the lines be the Time in this duality? Could this pair be just one of many pairs of opposites manipulated by the artist to find and establish balance, equivalence, dynamic relations, and finally Beauty? (Dynamic sequence of inherent - but intuited - relationships). Note that balance and equivalence (of objective and subjective, and other opposites) are never established through symmetry (with the possible exception of his early Evolution, 1910-11): various elements, whether linear or spatial, are combined to set up dynamic rhythms with mutual relationships, but nothing 'equals' anything else. Mondrian insisted on the intuition of the artist as an organiser or administrator of the event which was the picture; this so that some degree of the subjective could enter into the process and, here too, balance the objective side - as typified by the use of straight black lines and the three primary colours 5 (themselves, in turn, balanced or objectified by white). In another sense however, Mondrian's colours 'represented' nothing but themselves; he saw colour as de-naturing both natural, or local colour, and matter. However, even he said that nothing in art can be absolutely neutral ("For every form, even every line, represents a figure, no form is absolutely neutral", PA&PPA); the point was to control, as far as possible, the personal so as to permit the universal to function fully.

Mondrian stated explicitly that neo-plasticism was based neither on calculation nor on philosophical reflexion and that the artists founded the new aesthetic only after they had created their works, from which it then derived6. The reference to 'calculation' may be due to another criticism levelled at abstractionists, that their work was too cerebral ('d'être cérébral à l'excès'); whether or not it was (is) too cerebral is perhaps a matter of opinion - a common enough opinion it would seem, in the Paris of the late 1920s and early '30s! However, there is no doubt that both the contributors to the magazine De Stijl and the adherents to the associated movement were quite cerebral; this was a trait common to a number of early 20th century European art movements, including Purism (French), Constructivism and Suprematism (both Russian). The complaint that Modernist art was too intellectual or cerebral was an almost universal one, coming from members of the general public as well as from sections of the more art educated or literate. What those various movements had in common was a dependence on ideas (often related to a desire to re-make the world, especially post-WWI) which were shared amongst their protagonists and adherents; the man (or woman)-in-the-street, so to say, was being asked to arm him- or herself with these ideas when considering the products of those movements. Approaching works of art with the assumption that one would be able to identify here a chair, there a figure, on that side a tree, behind that a castle and so on, was no longer to be the only, or even the major, way to interpret art. An implicit denial of the importance or even the role of representation of physical reality was an a priori position for many abstract Modernists.

In PA&PPA, Mondrian seems to me to express consistently his early Theosophical bent in the way he frequently refers to the spiritual in art, the desire for unity, the co-existence and co-dependence of opposites, and so on. He often uses such expressions as: "the unity of art", "universal beauty", "objective and subjective", "duality of forms", "the real equation of the universal and the individual", "inherent inter-relationships", "dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations". His assertion of the spiritual over the physical can also be related to Theosophical tenets. In a certain sense therefore, it would be incomplete to view Mondrian's art as a purely intellectual expression when his own writing is liberally sprinkled with "spiritual' or, so to speak, non-physical references; as were comments by van Doesburg and others; the spiritual, understood as the search for the "absolute". These same references, at least in terms of language, may be found in the theoretical expositions of any number of Modernist art movements; given this then, Mondrian is not much different from his artistic contemporaries.  The desire for an art 'purified' of its nostalgic and 'bourgeios' connections, especially following the many social upheavals in the first two decades of the 20th century, was typical of certain sections of the European avant-garde at that time7. For me, part of the enduring attraction and mystery of his pictures is their suggestion of some kind of inherent but largely occult (i.e. hidden) spiritual dynamism.



1'Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (Figurative Art and Non-Figurative Art)' by Piet Mondrian was published in English in Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art. Eds Martin, Nicholson and Gabo. Originally published in Britain in 1937 and later in the US in 1971 by Praeger Publishers, Inc. NY.

2 "Evidemment, l'œuvre cubiste, parfaite en elle-même, ne pouvait se perfectionner encore après son apogée. Il lui resta deux solutions: ou reculer côté naturel, ou bien continuer sa plastique vers l'abstrait, c'est-à-dire devenir la néoplastique", p 192 of 'Piet Mondrian. Écrits français', 2010, published by the Centre Pompidou. A remark by the publisher at the beginning of this book draws attention to Mondrian's sometimes 'idiosyncratic' French and states that it has republished his articles exactly as they first appeared: "Ceux-ci conservent ici leur forme originale, avec toutes leurs idiosyncrasies, qu'il s'agisse des néologismes, des majuscules incongrument disposées, ou encore des erreurs de ponctuation". In this article, I have copied the French as it appears in the various sources, especially Écrits français.

3 Mondrian's so-called 'lozenge' or 'diamond' paintings are particularly interesting or, to be more precise, the fact of a 'normal' canvas being turned 45 degrees to then be hung from one of its corners - the new 'top' - is interesting. I am unaware at the time of writing of the reason (if any) given by Mondrian himself for this choice although, a 1919 diagonal image (in a square format) of his apparently disturbed him so much that he insisted it be hung as a 'losenge' ('De Stijl 1917-1931', by Carsten-Peter Warncke, 1991, Taschen). However, looking at for example, 17th century pictures of Dutch church interiors, the existence of similarly hung images (often escutcheons), especially on the columns supporting the building, is clear. One wonders if perhaps this historical custom were not partly the conscious or unconscious stimulus to his very unusual choice! In this connection, see 'Mondrian. The Diamond Compositions', pp 51, 52  by E. A. Carmean, Jr., 1979, published by The National Gallery of Art, Washington. It should be noted that Mondrian was the only one of the De Stijl 'group' who, once he had made the decision, worked exclusively without 'deliberate' diagonals; other members of the group, such as van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, all made free and repeated use of diagonals. Theo van Doesburg indeed, re-named his diagonals-based format 'Elementarism'.

4 Victory Boogie Woogie is an example of 'constructing' a painting. It is known that, at a certain point after his arrival in the US, Mondrian began using coloured tapes as a means of 'sketching' his images, later removing the tape and substituting paint (in fact, there are several examples of unfinished works with strips of tape attached to them). When he died in 1944, Victory Boogie Woogie was left unfinished, with many small pieces of tape still attached to the surface of the canvas (as they are even today). It is obvious on close inspection of this master-work, that he was slowly and systematically 'building-up' layers of both paint and tape, in other words, that he was 'constructing' his image. Further, it is doubly clear that he saw this work as a construction given that the very active whites do not sit down on the surface but rather move in and out of 'our' space, i.e. the space in front of the physical picture plane, or flat surface of the canvas.

5 'Écrits français', p 192: "Les moyens plastiques, c'est-à-dire la ligne droite et la couleur primaire, ne peuvent pas être plus intériorisées et la composition restera toujours nécessaire pour neutraliser ces moyens".

6 idem, p 189: "Ceci établit clairement que la néoplastique n'est pas née de calculs ni de réflexions philosophiques. ... seule l'esthétique, née après l'œuvre des créateurs et résultant de celle-ci, ...".

7 The horrors of WWI and the attribution of it to a decadent 'bourgeios' elite out of touch with the fundamentals of life and the aspirations (and beliefs) of the 'common man', the reappraisal of the humility and vigour of 'folk art', the return to 'purified' and utilitarian forms and designs (Adolf Loos, Bauhaus, Purism, Le Corbusier, Suprematism, etc.) and the belief that art should serve 'ordinary' people (Neoplasticism, Le Corbusier, Constructivism, etc.) are all ideas and concepts which drove the 'cerebral' avant-garde towards 'simplified' yet highly-refined abstract expression. The social good of art per se was asserted and put forward as a modern alternative to nearly all the 'official' art of the past.

Piet Mondrian. Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43

Oil on canvas, 127 x 127 cm

Museum of Modern Art, New York

NB Unless otherwise noted, the photos used in this article were taken by the author during visits to the Netherlands and the USA.