PIET MONDRIAN founder of "NEOPLASTICISMO" together with TEO VAN DOESBURG who will give life to the magazine DE STIJL.
Unlike the Cubists, Mondrian tries to reconcile his painting with his spiritual research and in 1913 began to combine his vision of art with theosophical studies in a theory that will mark his final break with representative painting. In a letter to Hans-Peter Bremner in 1914 expresses his artistic theory very clearly.
“I build combinations of lines and colors on a flat surface, so as to express a general beauty with a supreme conscience. Nature (or what I see) inspires me, puts me, as another painter, in an emotional state that causes me an urge to do something, but I want to get as close to the truth as possible and abstract everything from it, until I reach the foundation (even if only the external foundations!) some things."
Already towards the end of 1919 he began to produce "grid" paintings, the style he would become famous for. The squares are painted with the primary colors, with thin rectangular shapes and the color of the grids that tends to lighten when they approach the edge of the canvas. Dal 1921 his style reaches a mature form. Thick black lines separate the different colored backgrounds . In September of 38, Mondrian leaves Paris due to the advance of Nazism and moves to London. After the invasion of the Netherlands and the fall of Paris in 40 he moved to New York where he remained until his death. The artist's new works in New York are even more amazing, the image of the city influences him considerably and his paintings become a complex grid of red lines, yellow and blue that create a sense of depth never reached.
“I express myself through the means of nature, but if you carefully observe the sequence of my work, you will see that it has gradually abandoned the natural appearance of things and has gradually emphasized the plastic expression of relationships. "
These "means of nature" , in the first Mondrian they are those that lead him to depict a phenomenal reality declined however according to those symbolic impulses that characterize the first part of his work. The artist carefully avoids shades , does not use curved lines, what he wants to build is a system of orthogonal lines and pure colors that create a harmonic tension and a balance of opposing forces.
