Piet Mondrian

The 20th century is distinguished in art history for one invention above all: abstraction. The Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was a pioneer in this development. His reputation rests on about 250 abstract paintings dating from 1917 to 1944, a modest number for over 25 years of work. Each painting was worked and reworked, built layer by layer toward an equilibrium of form, color, and surface.
Mondrian named his style "neoplasticism." That is how he translated his own Dutch phrase nieuwe beelding, which also means "new form" or "new image." The style was based, he explained, on an absolute harmony of straight lines and pure colors underlying the visible world.By the end of 1920 he had invented neoplasticism, in which pure primary colors and black lines came together in a unity that was neither random nor systematic but intuitive. Composition with Blue, Black, Yellow, and Red shows Mondrian's typical balancing of large areas of "non-color" against smaller accents of color, producing a structure in which restless sliding is resolved in a stable whole.Space is no longer a background for depicted objects; instead, the entire painting is an object of its own. Mondrian painted on a tabletop, not an easel, and built his own frames out of narrow strips of wood set back slightly from the canvas surface "to bring the painting forward from the frame... to a more real existence," as he put it.