Neo-Plasticism

Neo-Plasticism.
Term coined by Piet Mondrian for his style of austerely geometrical abstract painting and more broadly for the philosophical ideas about art that his work embodied. He claimed that art should be ‘denaturalized’, by which he meant that it must be purely abstract, with no representational relation to the natural world. To this end he limited the elements of pictorial design to the straight line and the rectangle (the right angles in a strictly horizontal–vertical relation to the frame) and to the primary colours—blue, red, and yellow—together with black, white, and grey. In this way he thought that one might escape the particular and achieve expression of an ideal of universal harmony. Mondrian took the term ‘nieuwe beelding’ (which might be translated as ‘new image creation’) from the writings of Dr Matthieu Schoenmaekers, a Dutch author of popular books on philosophy and religion, whom he admired for a time but later considered to be a charlatan. The Dutch term was rendered in French by Mondrian himself as ‘néo-plasticisme’, and this in turn was translated into English as Neo-Plasticism.