Neo-plasticism

Neo-Plasticism is the term adopted by the Dutch pioneer of abstract art Piet Mondrian to designate his own type of abstract painting, which reduced the image to the simplest elements: only horizontal and vertical black lines forming a grid, and fields filled with the three primary colours — red, blue and yellow — in combination with white, black and grey. Mondrian developed this language around 1917 to 1920 within the De Stijl movement, founded together with Theo van Doesburg. The name derives from the Dutch 'Nieuwe Beelding', 'new formation'. Mondrian sought to express a universal, timeless harmony and spiritual equilibrium, purging art of all figuration, individual feeling and chance. He believed that the strict balance of opposites — vertical and horizontal, colour and colourlessness — reflected the fundamental order of being. Neo-Plasticism exerted a profound influence on the architecture, design, typography and applied arts of the twentieth century, becoming one of the defining languages of geometric abstraction and a foundation of later modernist design.