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 ‘denaturized', 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. These ideas were greatly influenced by the writings of Dr Matthieu Schoenmaekers, a Dutch author of popular books on philosophy and religion, whom Mondrian admired for a time but later considered to be a charlatan. In his book Het Nieuwe Wereldbeeld (The New Image of the World), published in 1915, Schoenmaekers wrote of the pre-eminence of horizontals and verticals as follows: ‘the two fundamental complete contraries which shape our earth are: the horizontal line of power, that is the course of the earth around the sun, and the vertical, profoundly spatial movement of rays that originate in the centre of the sun'; and he similarly stressed the importance of the primary colours: ‘The three principal colours are essentially yellow, blue and red … Yellow is the colour of the ray … Blue is the contrasting colour to yellow … it is the firmament, it is line horizontality. Red is the mating of yellow and blue … Yellow radiates, blue “recedes”, and red floats.’

Mondrian took from Schoenmaekers the term ‘nieuwe beelding', which he used in his first published work, the long essay ‘De Nieuwe Beelding in de Schilderkunst’ (Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art), which appeared in twelve instalments of the periodical De Stijl in 1917–18. Paul Overy (De Stijl, 1991) writes that ‘The terms beeldend and nieuwe beelding have caused more problems of interpretation than any others in the writing of Mondrian and other De Stijl contributors who adopted them. These Dutch terms are really untranslatable, containing more nuances than can be satisfactorily conveyed by a single English word. Beeldend means something like “image forming” or “image creating”, nieuwe beelding “new image creation”, or perhaps “new structure”. In German, nieuwe beelding is translated as neue Gestaltung, which is close in its complexity of meanings to the Dutch. In French, it was rendered as “néo-plasticisme”, later translated literally into English as “Neo-Plasticism”, which is virtually meaningless.’ The first usage of the French word was by Mondrian himself in his book Le Néo-Plasticisme (1919); the first occurrences of the words ‘neo-plastician', ‘Neoplastic', and ‘Neo-plasticism’ cited in the Oxford English Dictionary are of 1933, 1934, and 1935 respectively. Later, some English writers adopted the phrase ‘the New Plastic', which Overy describes as an ‘absurd term'.