Neoplasticism

A closer look

Look first at the unpainted-looking spaces. Their height and width determine whether two colored planes seem to press together or have room to breathe.

What Mondrian meant by balance

In 1917 Piet Mondrian began setting out his ideas in De Stijl, the Dutch journal founded by Theo van Doesburg. Mondrian thought that the irregular shapes of things seen in nature concealed an underlying order. A painter could give that order visible form through a few relationships, such as a horizontal meeting a vertical or a patch of red beside a stretch of white. Neoplasticism names that artistic theory. De Stijl also brought together architects and designers who took those ideas in different directions.

Look at the AOI cover painting. The large red plane sits high and slightly to the right. The broad blue plane pulls the eye down and left. Now look between them. Several small ivory rectangles make the trip feel longer than the distance across the canvas would suggest. Those intervals do as much compositional work as the red and blue.

Four lines, then a whole city

In Tableau I: Lozenge with Four Lines and Gray (1926), Mondrian turns the square canvas onto a point. The four painted lines keep their horizontal and vertical bearings. Follow one toward the edge and notice the acute angle where the sloping canvas cuts it short. The shape of the support supplies a direction the painter can leave out of his brushwork.

In Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), the bars themselves change character. Black drops out. Runs of yellow break into small colored and pale beats. Trace a single run with your finger and notice where your eye jumps sideways at a crossing. The first painting puts pressure on the perimeter. The second finds much of its rhythm inside the grid. Both are oils on canvas.

Move one line

In the paired study, the blue and red rectangles occupy exactly the same area in both panels. Look at the middle band. In A, the upright cuts it in half. In B, the upright sits four-fifths of the way across, close to the blue rectangle above. Which panel draws your eye toward the right edge first?

Make the comparison with two sheets of paper and a loose black strip. Keep the colors fixed. Slide the strip until the narrow space beside it starts to read like a second stripe. Mark that position, step back, and try again. Recording where your reading changed gives you a reason to choose a spacing.

Take the painting off the easel

Mondrian pinned colored card to his studio walls and arranged furniture in relation to it. In a room, a doorway cuts a real opening, a cabinet has depth, and a person moving through the space keeps changing the view. Try placing a colored paper panel next to a door. Open the door halfway and look again from the threshold.

Van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren explored a related architectural problem in their 1923 Contra-Construction Project (Axonometric). Follow one colored plane until another conceals its edge. That overlap lets you read a three-dimensional arrangement on a flat sheet. The diagonal blue fold in our titled collage is a contemporary material variation. Compare it with Mondrian’s lozenge, where the diagonal belongs to the outer edge.