Minimal

Having a lot of practical tasks to do today, I decided to devote the first few hours to some reading about art.  This led me to look at some minimalist works and I settled on a theme for today's blip. 

My first listen is to a 1974 album by Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians, which doesn't really have any tracks as such.  The whole work, if you like that sort of thing and are in the right mood, is compelling.

A difficult hour or so this morning, reading about Formalism and Structuralism, concepts primarily developed to analyse literature. I think I “got” it when the chapter moved on to discuss the concepts in the context of work by Braque, Picasso and a favourite of mine, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. He coined the name “neoplasticism”, aiming to free the work of art from representing a momentary visual perception and from being guided by the personal temperament of the artist. 

Mondrian sought to render “a true vision of reality” in his painting, with a composition not from a fragment of reality but rather from an overall abstract, harmonious view. A painting did not have to begin from an abstracted view of nature; it could emerge out of purely abstract rules of geometry and colour. He found that this was the most effective language through which to convey his spiritual message.

Mondrian’s first neoplastic paintings were composed of rectangles in soft hues of primary colours painted on a white background with no use of line. His compositions were based on colour and appear to expand over the borders of the canvas into space beyond the picture. In 1918 he reintroduced lines into his painting, linking the colour planes to one another and to the background by a series of black vertical and horizontal strips, thus creating rectangles of colour or non-colour (white, black and grey). 

In 1919, he created two versions of a checkerboard composition, one in dark and one in light colours, in which the difference of the hues transforms this common pattern into a rhythmic sequence of squares, which play off each other to suggest vibrancy and movement. His earlier work had titles invoking the elements of nature or architecture depicted. The titles of his works from 1919 onwards reflect his move to pure abstraction, with titles such as Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow and Grey  (1921) and Diagonal Composition (1921).