After World War I, many artists wanted to build a new, orderly world from the simplest parts. Two movements did this in different ways: De Stijl in the Netherlands and the Bauhaus school in Germany. Both grew out of abstraction and both wanted art to reach into everyday life: furniture, houses, typefaces and objects.
Looking closely: Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow
Describe. Thick black horizontal and vertical lines divide a square canvas into rectangles. One large square at the upper right is red; a small one at the lower left is blue; a tiny one at the lower right is yellow; the rest are white. Analyze. Nothing is symmetrical, yet the picture is balanced: the heavy red is answered by the small, dense blue and yellow and by the black bars, some of which stop short of the edge. Mondrian used only the three painter's primaries, black and white. Interpret. Piet Mondrian (1872 to 1944) called his style Neoplasticism: reducing painting to its basic elements to express a universal harmony behind the changing world.
Key idea
Common mistake
De Stijl ("The Style") was founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg and Mondrian, with a magazine of the same name. The furniture maker and architect Gerrit Rietveld turned its ideas into objects: his Red and Blue Chair (designed in 1917, painted in its famous colors around 1923) and the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht (1924), with sliding walls and planes of primary color.
The Bauhaus
The architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919. It moved to Dessau in 1925, into a building Gropius designed with a glass curtain wall that showed the workshops inside, and to Berlin in 1932; under pressure from the Nazi government it closed in 1933. Students learned basic design, then trained in workshops (metal, weaving, furniture, printing, ceramics) to design objects that could be made by industry. Teachers included Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee; Anni Albers made weavings, Marianne Brandt metal lamps and teapots, Marcel Breuer tubular steel chairs. When teachers and students left Germany, many came to the United States and spread its ideas.
Why it works
Worked example: Why is it balanced?
- A large area of a strong color has a lot of visual weight.
- Small areas of intense blue and yellow, and thick black lines, add weight elsewhere.
- The unequal parts balance each other: asymmetrical balance.
Answer: Small, intense colors and black lines balance the large red square.