NEO-PLASTICISM

Revision

Beginnings
This avant-garde movement founded by
Theo van Doesburg in the Netherlands
It was essentially a painting and sculpture
movement, even when it had some
architectonical examples too.
The basic aim of the movement was to
try to produce pure form and colour,
completely devoid of realism and the
artists emotion

Characteristics
Neo-plastic style is characterized by a reversion
to the basic fundamentals of art:

colour,
form,
level,
and line.

Artists used mostly straight horizontal and

vertical lines and black, white, grey and primary
colours.

End
The Neo-Plasticism ended in 1919 when
van Doesburg founded a new alliance
called `Abstraction-Creation.
The Neo-Plasticism was very influential in
the development of the Bauhaus and the
International Style.
The most famous artist of the movement
was Piet Mondrian.

Tenets
The tenets of Neo-Plasticism are the following:
Coloration must be in the primary colours
of red, blue and yellow or the no colours of
black, grey and white.
Surfaces must rectangular planes or
prisms
Aesthetic balance must be achieved and this is
done through the use of opposition
Compositional elements must be straight line or
rectangular areas
Symmetry is to be avoided

Tenets
Balance and rhythm are enhanced by
relationships of proportion and location.
Compositional elements must be straight
line or rectangular areas
Symmetry is to be avoided
Balance and rhythm are enhanced by
relationships of proportion and location.

Mondrian
Mondrian began his career as a figurative painter but in 1911 he met the Cubists in Paris and
changed his mind about the construction of the
work of art.
After that he developed his poetry of the primary values or structural of the vision: line, plan,
colour.
He travelled to London and to New York where
his style was marked by the fraction and the
visual animation in the plan of his pictorial space.

Mondrian
In Mondrians opinion Cubism is rational but not
enough because it did not reach to the last
consequences.
He thought that nothing can be known without
feeling it but to know the real essence of things
it is needed to make a deep thinking in which
the mind works alone.
Given that the human mind is equal for every
person, the mental process should begin in some
common notions, this is, on the elements of the
line, the plane and the basic colours.

Mondrian
All his paintings between 1920 and 1940
are similar:
a net of coordinates that forms squares of
different dimension
and contains the basic colour with a
dominance of
the white (light) and
the almost present black (lack of light).

Mondrian
Each of them depends on a different
perceptive sensation (and consequently
sensitive and emotive).
Any experience of reality, does not matter
how different it will be, must lead to reveal
the constant structure of the consciousness.

Mondrian
His painting can be included in a perfect urbanism:
the city aims at having a living space for a society
whose acts should be rational, ethical and aesthetic.
His work had a great influence on architecture,
not only in the architectonical shapes but in the
value of vital functionality of the spaces, the plans
and anything that defines and distributes it, and
the project in itself.

Mondrian
Due to all these reasons his painting
may appear to be cold
Mondrian was, after Cezanne, the
highest, most conscious and most civic
conscience of modern art.