Mondrian and De Stijl

Mondrian forged his ideas of a serene and rational compositional order in a historical and logical progression that began from the discoveries of cubism and impressionism. The determination with which he reduced the pictorial elements in some of their most essential components provided the basis for the research, in the mid-century, of the rich phenomenological potential of material and pure process. His practically exclusive attention to the refinement of the colours and of primary forms, to the syntactical elements of an ideal and simplified abstract language, to balance and to the harmonious conjunction of the forms represents a vital link between the original conception of the modernist undertaking and the way in which we conceive it today.
In the eyes of 1990, we can say that the ideal embodied in abstraction was brought to a logical conclusion in the 1960s and 1970s by minimalist sculptors and painters. The message of the minimalists was concentrated on the extreme limits of the reductive, proposing the poetics of existential purity. The plastic manipulations of abstraction were reduced to a minimum of physical intervention: all that was needed to define art was the exercise of judgment and the gesture of decision. Mondrian had a determinant role in defining the terms of this development.
If the post-modern condition and the sensitivity to the historical context that accompany have eroded the urgency of abstraction by revealing its relativity, they have certainly not exhausted the historical discursive strength of that language. The current contextual re-examination of Mondrian and the other modernists leads to the discovery of the powerful duality imposed by the reciprocal relationship between the real and the ideal. One of the most brilliant nuclei of modernism protracts towards the idea of universal vision. Its pretexts are now necessarily more modest today, but it is this very modesty that brings the works closer to us; they are more accessible.

Venice, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
19 May – 2 September 1990

Information
Institute of Art History
Island of San Giorgio Maggiore – 30124 Venice
tel. +39 041 2710230
fax +39 041 5205842
e-mail: arte@cini.it

in collaboration with the Russian International Foundation for Culture and Olivetti S.p.A.