Piet Mondrian, one of the most influential twentieth century artists,
was born in Holland in 1872. Along with a prolific carreer as a painter,
he spent much of his time writing philosophical explanations for his highly
abstract work. Although he spent the early part of his career painting in
a somewhat traditional style, a realism that teetered into the surreal,
his late work consisted of geometrical abstractions of natural reality that
consisted wholly of primarty colors painted in vertical and horizontal lines.
At first glance his work seems like a random collection of starkly painted
rectangles, but, as his writings tell us, his work was highly methodical,
at least in its philosophical ends.
While living in Holland, Mondrian discovered the work of the Cubists
who were then centered in Paris. In 1912, excited by their innovative new
forms, Mondrian quickly moved to Paris to be closer to the epicenter of
modern artistic creativity. He was immediately struck by the geometry of
the city and started to try to depict it in his work using Cubist techniques.
Of Cubism, Mondrian wrote, "One can never appreciate the splendid effort
of Cubism, which broke with the natural appearance of things and partially
with limited form. Cubism's determination of space by the exact construction
of volumes is prodigious. Thus the foundation was laid upon which there
could arise a plastic of pure relationships, of free rythm,
previously imprisoned by limited form." Mondrian's attraction to this
new form originated in his questioning the purpose of any natural representation
at all. He found that traditional realist representation never captured
the true beaury of that which was represented. He also inherently idsdained
the subjectivity of emotion in realism that polluted the "pure relationships"
that could only be represented through abstract geometry. He wrote, "When
we show things in their outwardness (as they ordinarily appear), then indeed
we allow the human, the individual to manifest itself. But when we plastically
express the inward (through abstract form of the outward), then we come
closer to manifesting the spiritual, therefore the divine, the universal."
Perhaps like many philosophers in the tradition (Plato, Descartes, Kant),
Mondrian saw that pure geometry was one of the few uncorrupted intuitions
that we have. Many have argued that although we cannot find perfect geometrical
forms in reality, we do, in a sense, see and organize things with reference
to the purely intuited shapes of our abstract consciousness (or, e.g. "the
square in the mind of God"). Therefore, for a thinker like Mondrian,
to represent the "objective" would be to paint geometry.
