MONDRIAN: NEO-PLASTİSİZM VE MİMARLIĞA ETKİLERİ

Music sometimes gives us the sense of absolute, so music represents something beyond itself, it represents the universe. The complexity of the universe sometimes makes it incomprehensible for us. So in order to make it understandable we have to reduce its complexity to a minimum or make it abstract. It is true also that the more abstract it is in its relation to the actual environment of the source of sound, the more surely will the listener be persuaded into a proper state of receptivity (Arnheim, 1932,149-150). Mondrian's Neo-PIasticism principle was no different. He was against the complexity of the world, and tried to reduce it by constructive means in his plastic art. He thought of the complexity of art in his early time, which is due to the fact that different degrees of its evolution are present at one and the same time. As he felt that, by means of pure science we can achieve practical results for humanity, we also by means of pure art in more abstract ways could achieve similar contributions to our life. Hence, 64 METU JFA 1990 ABDULAZIZ AL-SAATI Figure İ. Painting by Mondrian, 1921 (Moszynska, 1990, 44). Figure 2. "The Red Tree' by Mondrian, 1909 (Hunter and Jacobus, 1985,160). There are more or less hidden in the reality which surrounds us and do not change. Not only science, but art also shows us that reality, at first incomprehensible, gradually reveals itself, by the mutual relations that are inherent in things. Pure science and pure an, disinterested and free, can lead the advance in the recognition of the laws which are based on these reationships (Mondrian, 1945,52). Mondrian felt that in art, content and form have been over-emphasized or neglected because what he calls 'their inseparable unity' has not been clearly realized, and in order to establish unity in art, balance between content and form must be created. Through that balance he was striving for equilibrium and simplicity towards universal beauty. He was referring to equilibrium in its dynamic means through a non-figurative representation in art, hence, Then we shall understand that the equilibrium of which we speak in non-figurative art is not without movement of action but is on the contrary a continual movement (Mondrian, 1945,57). Through the law of dynamic equilibrium, other laws may be depicted which represent the underlying law of nature, not their accidental features: If the execution of the work is to be the direct expression of the universal, then it may not be anything else than universal, i.e., abstract (DcSftjU p.5). An example of such laws is the one concerning the reaction of position and dimension. Since all the relations of position except the rectangular one lack stability, and often in most art representations the rectangular relationship expresses itself in an indeterminate manner, there is a need to destroy this stability to establish it in a determinate manner. Hence through the clarity and simplicity of neutral forms, non-figurative art has made the rectangular relation more and more determinate until finally, it has established it through free lines which intersect and appear to form rectangles (Mondrian, 1945,57). That is the object of Mondrian's art. Looking at late Mondrian painting [Figure 1], we can see the important change in his works. The focal point in his previous compositions before 1917 [Figure 2] are no longer there; it occupies the whole surface and even seems to go beyond it. The grid of straight black lines intersecting at right angles, the use of primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and the non-colors (white, gray and black) were integrated in an asymmetrical rhythm to produce harmony and balance. For a long time he was exploring the theme of horizontal and vertical, which proved that this theme has a reality of its own, and that it was a universal principle, a source of both life and language. This principle could be implied not only in painting but also in other media, i.e., architecture. For those who regarded his painting as a bunch of lines and colors or used as wall decorations, they should be reminded that his painting is definitely autonomous and capable of standing on its own. His painting represents the modern movement, artists who tried to emancipate themselves from the gravity of the earth by distributing visual weeight equally in the whole surface. Looking at his late painting we sense that there is no more weight at the bottom than at the top, but if we turn the painting upside down, we see it is heavier in the top (Arnheim, 1974,30-31). This is one of the things that makes his painting fascinating. Also for those who claimed that nothing was easier than to fake a Mondrian, Sandberg's experiment of the comparison between the original and the imitation NEO-PLASTICISM AND ARCHITECTURE METU JFA 1990 65 proved that it is very difficult to fake a Mondrian. Those, who understand how two black lines intersect or how the many layered color areas taper off at right angles, know what an eminently craftsmanlike, individual, visual energy characterized his works (Seuphor, 1972,12). The concept of equivalence of plastic means, implied a sense of visual weights of individual primary hues and varying their amounts to balance the non-colors (white, black and grays). The amount required of the yellow spectrum, for example, would naturally have to be greater. It is this equilibrium of disparate elements with its great sense of strength and clarity that marks a genuine Mondrian work. Today artists and architects fail to understand the color aspect of his works. They only capture the geometrical forms and relationships but fail in their use of colors because they look at colors as interchangeable. That way, architects and designers rely on their selection from a book of paint chips, which is a personal preference and not the spatial function or visual and psychological implications of color (Bliss, 1982,51-52). Today most architects' problem is that they tend to think of color as painted surfaces. Mondrian's contribution to architecture was not only in his sense of color, but also in his sense of proportions. He was by no means less important than the great Le Corbusier in his Modulor principle, which for the latter was a universal instrument to obtain beauty and rationality in the proportion of everything produced by man.