MONDRIAN AND DIRAC ON MINIMALISM

The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian is best known for strikingly simple canvases populated by vertical and horizontal planes rendered in primary colors. Mondrian's paintings from the 1930s: Composition with Yellow Patch, Composition No. 8, and Vertical Composition with Blue and White, are a far cry from his earliest canvases, Landscape with Ditch, Mill in Sunlight, and Red Tree. The early canvases feature colorful and vigorous representations of scenes, and are indebted to the post expressionists, Suerat and Van Gogh. These in time give way to the later compositions influenced by the analytical abstractions of the cubists, Picasso and Braque. The names of the later paintings reveal a parallel trend towards descriptive simplicity. In his correspondence, Mondrian provides a clue to his thought leading to this change of style: “The principle of this art…is not a negation of matter, but a great love of matter, whereby it is seen in the highest, most intense manner possible, and depicted in the artistic creation.” (1912) and “We arrive at a portrayal of other things, such as the laws governing matter. These are the great generalities which do not change.” (1913) (Faerna, 1997). Over the course of the cultural evolution of Mondrian's creative life, we observe a systematic trend away from detail and realism and towards minimalism and abstraction. Painterly subjects easily recognized in his early canvases become a kind of affine symbolism in the later paintings.