Collection: Neoplasticism

Neoplasticism is the visual doctrine that Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) formulated from 1917 onward and codified in his 1920 essay Le Néo-Plasticisme, published by Léonce Rosenberg in Paris. The Dutch term Nieuwe Beelding, rendered in French as Néo-Plasticisme, designated a painting reduced to horizontal and vertical lines, the three primary colours red, yellow, and blue, and the non colours black, white, and grey. Mondrian held that this restricted vocabulary expressed the pure relations underlying material reality.

Neoplasticism served as the theoretical backbone of De Stijl, but the two are not identical: De Stijl was the broader Dutch movement and magazine, while Neoplasticism designated Mondrian's specific painting doctrine. The canonical works are the Paris compositions of the 1920s and early 1930s, including Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (1930) and Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red (1937–42). After his move to New York in 1940 Mondrian relaxed the system, replacing black grids with bands of pure colour in Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) and the unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie (1944). Mondrian had broken with Theo van Doesburg in 1924–25 over the latter's introduction of the diagonal in Elementarism.