De Stijl, neoplastic, abstract, mystical, theosophical and anthropophous: difficult to return to words his simplicity
De Stijl. Neoplastic. Abstract. Mystical? Theosophical and anthroposophile.
It is almost impossible for words to return the simplicity of Mondrian. They always complicate everything, too much, the words. Adjectives should fall. Nouns should fall. And metaphors should fall, fall like leaves in autumn.
So that the ramifications become lines. And the lines, small borders that hold ideas, which have then been moods, and something more, to which only the abstract can allude.
There are artists who mark the culmination of an era: in Picasso, in Kandinsky is all the history that preceded them to express themselves. These artists, in a sense, leave no heirs: they cannot be imitated and they express an art that, although not born with them, dies with them. They mark the end and culmination of an artistic season.
he opens a new season and makes art overflow its boundaries
Other artists, like Mondrian, must be imitated in the sense that it is impossible not to do so; they are inevitable for those who come after them; and they are not a climax, but an opening: they open up a new season and make art go beyond its limits.
Minimalism, Bauhaus, conceptual art: what would they be without the exact geometries of Mondrian? Fashion, design, graphic: even when the Compositions of the Dutch artist are not explicitly imitated, as in the clothes of Yves Saint Laurent, they are implicitly.
In one of the first experiments on computer-generated “art”, at Bell Laboratories in 1966, about 100 workers were presented with the Composition with lines (1977) and a computer-generated reproduction. About 59% preferred the computer-generated image.
One wonders what would be minimalism, Bauhaus and conceptual without HIS geometries
One could conclude, rightly, that computer scientists do not understand anything about art (on the other hand, the writer is also a computer scientist). Or one could conclude, just as rightly, that the Mondrian geometries have little or nothing to do with the random generation of lines in a computer.
In any case, the episode shows how even computers had to pass through Mondrian’s examination, along a path that would have made Plato happy, from imitation to abstraction.
Plato, in fact, of artists who imitated real things and poets did not know what to do with them. And, outside his academy of philosophy, he had written that entry was forbidden to those who did not know geometry. More than two millennia later, it would be appropriate to include about 59% of the workers of Bell Laboratories.
