Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition XII

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944): Primarily an Abstractionist

Composition A, Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue, 1920

Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921

Composition blanc, rouge et jaune, 1936

Composition No. 8, 1939-42

Composition No. 10, 1939-1942

New York City, 1941-42

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means we are only line and color.

In past times when one lived in contact with nature, abstraction was easy; it was done unconsciously. Now in our denaturalized age abstraction becomes an effort.

The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore the object must be eliminated from the picture.

Curves are so emotional.

Everything is expressed through relationships.

Intellect confuses intuition.

Nature or, that which I see, inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation, still just an external foundation, of things . . .

Reality manifests itself as constant and objective - independent of us, but as changeable in space and time. Consequently, its reflection in us contains both properties. Mixed up in our mind, these properties are confused and we do not have a proper image of reality.

The purer the artist's "mirror" is, the more true reality reflects in it. Overseeing the historical culture of art, we must conclude that the mirror only slowly is purified. Time producing this purifying shows a gradual, more constant and objective image of reality.

To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.

Piet Mondrian

Musique du Jour: Born Ruffians, Red, Yellow and Blue

Addendum XIV

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968): Primarily A Conceptualist

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) - Concetto spaziale, attese, 1960

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) - Concetto spaziale, attese, 1963

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) - Concetto spaziale, attese, 1968

Color . . . thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.

Charles Baudelaire

Coda V

Fernand Léger (1881-1955): Primarily a Neo-Cubist

The Bargeman, 1918

Three Women, 1921

The Four Cyclists, 1943-48

The Great Parade, 1954

Trapeze Artists, 1954

Two Women Holding Flowers, 1954

What does that represent? There was never any question in plastic art, in poetry, in music, of representing anything. It is a matter of making something beautiful, moving, or dramatic - this is by no means the same thing.

Every canvas, even if non-representational, that depends upon harmonious relationships of the three forces - color, volume and line - is a work of art.

Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.

Even a part of an object has value. A whole new realism resides in the way one envisages an object or one of its parts.

The realistic value of a work is completely independent of its properties in terms of content.

Et Tu, Roy?

Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923) - Kiss V, 1964