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Mondrian – the master of line and color blocking!

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) came from a family of a church school principal in Amersfoort, Holland. He began painting at the age of 14, became a local high school art teacher at the age of 20, and began working in academic and realism, then drew from Impressionism, Symbolism and Post-Impressionism. It was not until 1911, after seeing the early Cubist works of Picasso and Braque in Holland, that he rushed to Paris the following year and began to paint according to the Cubist method.

Initially, he tried to depict landscapes in the purest primary colors of red, yellow, blue and green. In later years, he used abstract planes and frontalized landscapes, and in 1914 returned to the Netherlands to found the Stylists and advocate New Plasticism.

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Mondrian saw neo-formalism as a means by which to reduce the richness and variety of nature into expressive objects with certain relationships through such abstract symbols.

He believed that “only pure plasticity can complete the final abstraction. In the plastic arts, authenticity can only be expressed through form and color, with the homogeneity of kinetic movement, and it is the pure means that provides the most effective way of reaching this point.” This idea led him to become, through right angles, a non-equal, opposing equilibrium by reducing color to primary colors and adding black and white.

As he himself says: “Step by step I excluded curves until my work was finally completed by straight and horizontal lines, forming, for example, crosses, each separated and spaced from the other, straight and horizontal lines being the expression of two opposing forces, the balance of such opposites existing everywhere and controlling everything.”

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In Mondrian’s paintings of 1914, the curves had disappeared and the vertical and horizontal structures were dominant; after 1919, through the dynamic balance of vertical and horizontal lines and the use of primary colors, he completed his ideal of representing the universe, achieving a state of unity between man and nature.

Mondrian believed that the geometric forms of vertical and parallel lines were the most basic elements of art forms, and that only geometric forms were the most suitable for expressing “pure reality”, and he wanted to use these basic elements, the purest colors, to create a balance between the surface and the inside, between matter and spirit.

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The idea of creating such balanced art was rooted in the social reality of the time, when society was in a state of general unrest through a great war, and he created this type of tranquil and balanced art in an attempt to comfort people’s troubled hearts. The idea of creating such balanced art was rooted in the social reality of the time, when society was in a state of general unrest through a great war, and he created this type of tranquil and balanced art in an attempt to soothe people’s unsettled minds.

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