Word: mondrian
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...placed three small words on the threshold of infinity: The Big Country. To credit the cast and crew of The Seven Year Itch, he used a set of pastel panels opening like tessellated greeting cards. That was all. But the colors and layout were as visually delightful as a Mondrian in motion. And the t in Itch scratched itself...
...Find the Constant. Though Mondrian admired the impressionists, he had no desire to follow in their steps. Nor did the cubists go far enough. "Instinctively," he wrote, "I felt that painting had to find a new way to express the beauty of nature." He decided that the colors of nature could not be reproduced on canvas, so he gave up "natural color" for "pure color"-the primaries, red, yellow and blue. He also gave up all effort to reproduce natural forms, for these, he said, were at the mercy of the artist's subjective feelings. What Mondrian was looking...
...curved line gradually disappeared from Mondrian's paintings, and his verticals and horizontals inevitably created rectangles. Eager to scourge any suggestion of form from his work, Mondrian insisted that these were not rectangles, for in his definition a rectangle could exist only beside another form that contrasted with it. He argued, for example, that a rectangle placed next to a circle would take on an individual identity; when compared only with other rectangles it loses its individuality and becomes a universal. Mondrian was determined to destroy everything that shackled his painting to outer appearances or confused the face...
...Catch the Rhythm. The process of destruction-or liberation, as Mondrian saw it-continued. For many years he filled some of his rectangles with primary color. But in time Mondrian came to feel that these rectangular planes were too dominating and would somehow have to be destroyed. His solution was to drain the color from the rectangle and pour it into the lines. The unhampered play between the verticals and horizontals then seemed to produce a kind of rhythm, a "dynamic equilibrium" that was like the pulse of life...
...Mondrian did not begin experimenting with his colored lines until after he came to Manhattan during World War II. He loved the city with a passion that was exceeded only by his love of boogie-woogie. Like the music, the city had its rhythm, and this Mondrian tried to reproduce in his painting of New York, one of the last things he did before his death of pneumonia in 1944. In the Janis show, two unfinished paintings reveal the struggle that went into such a work. Mondrian used plastic tapes while trying to find the right design; he would...