Colour / Not Colour 10 (Found Entropic Mondrian)

 

Photo-Manipulations: April 2023

“De Stijl sought to establish a new unity in all the arts. They were all to work together to shape the modern world, and were indeed already doing so. In accordance with Mondrian’s ideas, van Doesberg propounded the theory that henceforth in art ‘nature and intellect, or the feminine and masculine principle, the negative and the positive, the static and the dynamic, the horizontal and the vertical’ should be brought into equilibrium.” [1.]

All Original Images: Central Leicester, February 2023

“The search for meaning and form was now transferred in the imagination to society as a whole. The concept underlying Mondrian’s paintings – namely to appear as never completed works – was the same as that of the cathedral.” [2.]

"...Mondrian and van Doesberg both agreed that avant-garde painting had to be allied to an equally radical modern architecture. Clear colours in combination with simple white structural elements were to take the place of the sad and stuffy world of the 19th century, which they liked to refer to as 'brown'. Once this new architecture was established, all the problems of justifying avant-garde painting would be solved at a stroke. How would anyone be able to reproach them for painting pictures that no one could understand or need, when examples of the new architecture were springing up everywhere, proclaiming their ideas of colour." [3.]

"In a book completed in manuscript form in 1931 under the title of 'The New Art - The New Life' ('Le Nouvel Art - La Nouvelle Vie: La Culture De Rapports Purs'), Mondrian proclaimed the end of art was imminent. This end would include the end of the Old World, and thereafter the 'new life' and the dawning utopian era could profit from the energies formally used to produce works of art during the dark ages of the human race." [4.]

[1.] - [4.]:  Susan Deicher, 'Mondrian 1872 - 1944: Structures in Space', Cologne, Midpoint/Taschen, 1994/2001

Primary Source

West Leicester, April 2018

I went out to photograph white vans, the other day, and ended up with this primary-coloured gem, as well (actually, the white vans are there too - in the background).  It doesn't really relate to anything specific in my current work, but is just the kind of thing that purely delights my eye without any other agenda.  It does, I suppose, fit into my recurrent category of 'Yellow Things', although the conjunction of all three primary colours actually feels more significant here.

Actually, I'd been waiting for ages to capture this particular subject.  I pass it regularly, but it's nearly always obscured by the frenetic human activity of one of those busy hand car-wash spots that proliferate in every city.  My chance finally arrived when everyone knocked-off, briefly, for an Easter breather - just as the sun came out.

Given that juxtaposing the three primaries will always tend towards a certain stridency - it feels like my subject has arrived at a perfect proportional balance of yellow-blue-red through entropy alone.  Thinking about that made me reflect on how hard it can be to pull off this kind of thing deliberately in a painting.  What better excuse then, to have another look at one of my all time favourite paintings, 'Molen Mill In Sunlight', by Piet Mondrian?

Piet Mondrian, 'Molen Mill In Sunlight', Oil on Canvas, 1908

I consider Mondrian one of the great colourists in western art - and he would, of course, go on to make a habit of expertly balancing the three primaries in his later Neo-Plasticist paintings.  To achieve it within a coherent representational image, as he did here, feels even more impressive in many ways.  He managed to create a painting which is elegiac (almost hallucinogenically so) and yet also deeply meditative - using what might so easily have been the bluntest of tools.  Closer inspection reveals the importance of those lesser injections of greenish and violet and orange secondaries.  They seem to play a similar modulating role to that of the neutrally-coloured areas of erosion and grime in my own photographs.