THE ORIGIN AND DEMISE OF NEOPLASTICISM

MaXXi Museum (Museo Nazionale della Arti del XXI Secolo) - Sunday, June 19th, 2011

Neoplasticism painting by Piet Mondrian

On June 19th we went to MaXXi, a contemporary art museum in Rome. While there we checked out an exhibit about Gerrit Rietveld, an influential Neoplasticism furniture designer and architect. This got me thinking about the whole Neoplasticism movement. I started wondering about its origin and its demise. 

MaXXI Museum in Rome

The movement was started by the De Stijl group, a group of Dutch artists in Amsterdam in 1917. The two key artists were, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. The movement was founded in Holland during the Great War. It was inspired by the artists’ desire for harmony and balance amidst the chaos and conflict raging around them.

Van Doesburg personified the group. He started calling Mondrian’s followers, “De Stijl”, which is Dutch for “The Style”, and started a magazine by the same name. Through this magazine, van Doesburg carried the group’s ideas throughout Europe until he died in 1931. De Stijl’s ideas about space were founded on the philosophy of Isaac Newton. Newton differentiates between absolute and relative space. Absolute space cannot be experienced; it becomes measurable through relative space. So by creating a relative space like a house, we experience absolute space by shrinking universal space to a human scale.

De Stijl magazine

Neoplasticism chair by Gerrit Rietveld

Neoplasticism architecture by Gerrit Rietveld, Schröderhuis

Mondrian started the movement because he felt that cubism had fallen short of it goal of developing “the expression of pure plastics”, which is why he called the new movement Neoplasticism. The idea behind the movement was the deconstruction of art to its base elements. They did this through colour, shape and space. For colour they used only primary colours and neutrals, red, blue, yellow, grey, white and black. This also added to the abstractness of the work because the primary colours are actual quite unrealistic. They are not found in nature. For shape they reduced the forms to horizontal and vertical lines and planes. Finally, for space, the shapes had to appear to extend into space, materialising the idea of connecting to universal space.

At first, Neoplasticism only inspired painting and sculpture, but soon spread to design architecture. Gerrit Rietveld was one of the main causes of this. This was good news for the movement’s goal of creating close collaboration among the art forms.

The movement ended in 1931 with the death of Van Doesburg. His journal ceased publication in 1932 with a commemorative issue edited by his wife. By then, the original artists had long since gone their separate ways.


Now you know all about Neoplasticism.

By Anne Charbonneau, Amanda Cox and Laura Van Staveren

Keywords: Design History