Essay
For the purpose of this essay, I will be writing about the way in which The Composition II by Pier Mondrian and the ‘Mondrian’ cocktail dress by Yves Saint Laurent compare to one another and how a demand for change at a point in time impacts both of these artworks as well as a relation to structure and architecture even though neither artist/designer is an architect. Yet in contrast to that I would also like to high light the way in which there aims differ.
Pier Mondrains earlier work was painting trees and landscapes and that was consistent throughout his career though his work became more abstract. The lines and colours in his painting Composition I represent the same idea of nature but are metaphors for the balancing of opposing forces: man and nature, individuality and society, He believed that art reflected the underlying spirituality of nature.
His work became more of a statement about dynamic equilibrium using simple line, geometric shape and primary colour, a minimalist approach. According to Richard R. Brettell (1999) Mondrian was the most consistent and important painter/theorist connected with geometric abstraction. Mondrian believed that it was time to move art on wanted to push past Cubism and create a new artist movement and strive for a progression in painting. Modernism is a style/movement in the arts that aimed to break with classical and traditional forms. Cubism By the likes of Picasso and Braques analysis of objects into geometric shapes developed into Mondrians austere canvases that uses straight line, right angle and primary colour. Hannah Höch on Piet Mondrian, quoted by Edouard Roditi,said that ‘Everything in his life was reasoned or calculated. He was a compulsive neurotic and could never bear to see anything disordered or untidy. He seemed to suffer acutely, for instance, if a table had not been laid with perfect symmetry’. You can see evidence of this in his artwork, Mondrians work has a particular layout and structure, and he worked methodically and mathematically. Each painting was worked and reworked upon, built up in layers towards what he believed was balanced.
The Term Paper on What Is Art Back Work Painting
Intro In late Antiquity the arts consisted of the seven artes liberal es, the liberal arts: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music. Philosophy was the mother of them all. On a lower level stood the technical arts like architecture, agriculture, painting, sculpture and other crafts. 'Art' as we of it today was a mere craft. Art in the Middle Ages was 'the ape of ...
Mondrian was not the only artist with the same vision of what direction art should have been taking. This group of artist were called the De Stijl. Other members of the De Stijl were Dada, Vilmos Huszár, Georged Vantongerloo, Bart Van Der Leck and Theo Van Doesburg. As the post-war economy improved, Modernists desire to create a better world began to form. Underpinning this movement towards the New was the idea of the ‘New Spirit’ which collectively reflected new social and economic relations and excitement of the development of new technology. Modernists hoped his would seize the imagination of everyone and fundamentally transform the way people lived after such an important, devastating point in time after the First World War. Piet Mondrian and other artists associated with de Stijl in the 1910s and 1920s often used the term Nieuwe beelding which means ‘New Imagery’ in relation to the break through in art they were trying to achieve. The search for the ‘new imagery’ was characterized by the use of the most basic elements of image-making: straight lines (horizontal and vertical), the primary colours and rectangular forms which sums up Composition 1 completely. Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg were the major proponents of the De Stijl movement.
During The World war, Mondrian executed a series of landscape and still life paintings to refine his ideas to ultimately develop a pure abstract style. Emerging out of the Netherlands after the First World War, Mondrian and Van Doesburg moved to Paris and produced a new theory of creation named Neo-Plasticism. Neo- Plasticism’s aim was to create a cohesive unity by using the limitation of colour to just primaries of red, blue and yellow. They believed that through these colours and linear line they alone could portray and express all without words. There aim was to demonstrate a utopian ideal of what humanity could become individually and as a society. The means to achieve this was in the integration of architecture, painting and sculpture into one environment.
The Term Paper on In 1841 An American Artist John Rand Invented Collapsible Metal part 1
In 1841 an American artist John Rand invented collapsible metal tubes for oil paints. For impressionists, who often painted out-of-doors, this new convenience was indispensable. Before the invention of tubes, painters would have carried bladders (see image below left) to store the paint that they would have made in their studio. The bladders would have been made from pig membrane and tied at the ...
Things such as flowers and trees would not be used for beautification. Beautiful cities would be produced through the opposition of buildings and empty spaces and the new integration of the arts in an equilibrated way through their style of painting.
In 1965, Yves Saint Laurent designed a collection of clothes in wool and jersey inspired by Piet Mondrian’s Composition II. Youth predominated the culture of the 1960’s. The post World War II Baby Boom had created 70 million teenagers for the sixties, and these youth swayed the fashion, the fads and the politics of the decade. Culture was evolving. By 1964 the teenage influence caused the hemlines to creep up, and most teenagers were wearing mid-thigh length shifts as daywear. Yves Saint Laurent needed to adjust to this drastic change in population history and demand for individuality to appeal to his audience. I can see that Yves Saint Laurent constructed the dresses with Mondrians structural method in mind. The basis for the appearance of the dresses was conceived like a canvas and set in blocks just like the artist used to set his paintings also staying within Mondrians simplistic colour scheme of just the three primary colours with white divided by horizontal and vertical black lines. The dresses are not only a clear homage to one of the most famous contemporary artists of his time, but also show a brilliant use of the graphic technique, since the colour-blocking allows to accommodate the body form, shape it to fit and also clear all the manipulatively placed seaming within the black lines for innovative aesthetic effects and so that the dress looked like a flat canvas that Mondrian created his painting upon four decades earlier. I believe that was the biggest success of Yves Saint Laurents’ Mondrian dress collection, The New York times stated “The brightest and freshest he has ever done,” of his 1965 Mondrian-inspired shift dresses, which were a feat of engineering that allowed the fabric to hang as flat as the artist’s canvases while still conforming to the curves of the female body. Encasing the body in a sturdy thought out structure much like architecture.
The Essay on Description Of Historical Painting
Allegory of Charles I of England and Henrietta of France in a Vanitas Oil on canvas painting as done by Frenchmen by the name of Simon Renard de Saint-Andre between the years of 1669 and 1677. The main purpose in evaluating this piece of work is to be aware and describe the physical features, content and symbolization of this painting. This will undoubtedly include the complexity of painting and ...
From Researching both pieces by Mondrian and Yves Saint Laurent I can conclude that there is more than just the aesthetics to these two pieces that links both art works together. Both pieces were created at a time where there was demand for of change post World Wars, where boundaries were changing, perceptions and society were changing and people were in a different innovating and spiritual mind set on life. That in my opinion was why Yves Saint Laurent decided to take inspiration from Piet Mondrian, They were at the same stage at a point in time where I felt they needed to make a change and get their audience to think differently. Though I also believe that structure and architecture played a large part in both pieces, where in Mondrians piece it was about the placement and balance of his paintings where as in Yves Saint Laurents it was in the shaping within the cleverly placed seams to encase the human form much like architecture. However the clear difference in the reasoning of their work is also clear. Mondrian wanted to make a difference spiritually and aesthetically, to widen the minds and broaden imagination to quite literally get people to ‘read between the lines’, in contrast to that as clever as construction of Yves Saint Laurents Mondrian dress was, he reasoning was to sell and make money out of his audience and to have the teenagers of the 60’s wearing his clothing.
Which I find an interesting point when it is considered that today Mondrians paining of Composition II is valued at £17million and a Mondrian Dress by Yves Saint Laurent is worth £30,000. I believe that is because Mondrians painting was a break through in artistic history, something that no-one had ever done before with his own theory and years of research to correctly push these ideas into something unique and thought provoking and Yves saint laurents design was based upon that break through and the idea was an appropriation of something that already existed, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1920) best summed this up by saying ‘Art is not a mirror to reflect the world but a hammer with which to shape it’.
Mondrian Dress – Essay
Mondrian Dress I have decided to write about Piet Mondrian’s work . He was a dutch artist, I have chosen to talk about the ‘Mondrain dress’. – It was designed in 1965 by a French designer named Yves Saint Laurent who was born in 1936 in Algeria. Mondrian’s paintings were representational and showed the influenced of Georges Seurat's pointillism and the vibrant colors of Fauvism Upon his discovery ...
Bibliography
Richard R. Brettell (1999) Modren Art 1851 – 1929. New York: Oxford University PressRike: Mondriaan’s ‘Nieuwe Beelding’ in English (Amsterdam, 1991)
Hutchinson’s Twentieth Century Encyclopedia (1999) – Helicon Publishing LTD
Vogue.com
http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=fa.003.0545a
