Opposition of Lines Red and Yellow
Project
Piet Mondrian
Volunteer:
Date:
Grade Level: 2nd Grade
Artist: Piet Mondrian
Print Sculpture: Opposition of Lines Red and Yellow
Art Vocabulary: Abstract
I The Artistand His Materials and Techniques:
Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter who lived from 1872 until 1944.
We’re going to talk about one of his paintings in particular, called Opposition of Lines Red and Yellow.
But first, let me tell you something about his life:

  • Born in 1872, he was the oldest son of a Calvinist teacher.

  • His dad wanted him to become a teacher. He did indeed train to become a teacher, but his heart was set on becoming a painter, so he enrolled in an Amsterdam arts school in 1892.

  • For 15 years, he didn’t have much success at making a living as a painter. He mostly taught art and painted portraits for people.

  • In 1910, he moved to Paris where he lived and studied. In 1938, he moved to London and set up a studio. When his studio was nearly bombed in 1940, he came to New York. _ Despite his great contribution to the world of art, Mondrian was nearly always poor his whole life.
His work (Pass around the cards that show examples of his work.):

  • Mondrian started his career in Holland as an old-fashioned painter of scenery. He often sketched by moonlight and at the time considered himself a realist – that is, someone who painted things just how they looked.

  • Some of his favorite subjects were the tree, dunes and ocean, a church, a windmill – all found in his native Holland.

  • After he moved to Paris, much of his work centered on what’s called cubism and abstract painting. You may remember Cubism from your study of Pablo Picasso last year. Cubism is when the artist takes the subject and turns it into a series of cubes on the canvas. Abstract art takes that a step further to the point where you won’t be able to tell what the painting is of.

  • Mondrian discovered Cubism when he moved to Paris and met artists who were doing this type of work. At the time, it was often sharply criticized by people who thought artists should be painting the world just as we see it – a tree as a tree.

  • Soon, Mondrian became a pioneer in what’s called abstraction art.

  • Why did he do this? Well the more Mondrian looked at trees, buildings and vases, the more he saw their basic shapes and colors. You can try this too Just squint your eyes while you are looking at something and all the details will start to disappear. You will see shapes and color – no real objects. This is what Mondrian did.

  • A man who interviewed Mondrian after he had moved to New York explained the artist’s love for straight lines that crossed one another as a love for infinity. The space between two parallel lines, too, can go on forever. He liked that idea that you could imagine taking his lines off the canvas and keep going on into space.

  • He liked to work with lines and rectangles – using natural scenery as his guide for those lines, but nearly obliterating any resemblance to a real scene.

  • In 1914, he decided to eliminate all curved or slanting lines from his work. So what was left was only horizontal and vertical lines, with no suggestion of three-dimensional figures at all.

  • By 1917, he had developed what he called Neo-Plasticism – a style of composition for which he was best known. No sign of brush stroke or individual technique. Simply vertical and horizontal lines broken at various places into rectangles.

  • Mondrian used just a few primary colors.

  • His work became livelier after he moved to New York City. The busy, vibrant city, as well as his love for jazz music, inspired him to enter a new phase in his career. He started breaking up the lines into small squares – a style he called the Boogie Woogie series.

  • Later in life, some say he developed an intense dislike for the color green. He went out of his way to avoid trees and painted the leaves on an artificial tulip in his studio white.
How his work affected our world:

  • His art has had a profound influence on much industrial, decorative and advertisement art since the 1930s.

  • Architect Mies van der Rohe was influenced by Mondrian’s work, as well. Look at the Chicago skyline sometime and search for buildings that match his style of vertical and horizontal lines, broken up by rectangles here and there.
II Composition
This painting is called Opposition of Lines Red and Yellow. It is an abstract painting, which means it’ is not a painting of anything you can see in the real world. It’s a painting of lines and colors. All paintings are made of lines and colors. All paintings are made of lines and colors, but the ones we looked at last year used line, color, form, and something from the real world, like a man and a boy, or a ballet dancer. Abstract art uses color, shape, texture – to make a picture, but not a picture of anything from the world we can see.

  • How does the painting make you feel?

  • What do you see in this painting?

  • What would you call it?

  • What do you think of abstract art?
This painting is by Piet Mondrian. He was born in the Netherlands in 1872, over a 100 years ago.  He had an older brother and 3 younger sisters. His father was a school principal and an art teacher. Mondrian also learned to teach drawing, but what he always wanted to do was to paint, to be an artist. At first he painted landscapes. (show landscapes). When he was 35 (1907) his paintings changed. He began to use what he called "pure colors,’ and he put less and less detail in his paintings (show paintings). when he was 39 he saw a show of Cubist paintings by Braque and Picasso, who we did last year in cultural arts. Do you remember Braque’s birds? Do you the Cubist artists tried to show all parts of a person or thing at the same time? (show Cubism posters from last year’s cultural arts) Mondrian moved to Paris and began to do Cubist paintings. (show paintings) But his Cubist paintings were different. He was more interested in the lines, and soon was painting pictures that were abstract, pictures that were not pictures of anything. This is called abstract art, and Mondian was one of the first abstract artists. He said he was trying to show in his paintings "the physical expression of universal beauty."
During WWI he returned to the Netherlands and did paintings in just black on white, horizontal and vertical lines, that he felt expressed the sea, the sky, the stars, the bigness of nature. (show paintings) Why do you think these were called plus and minus paintings? He became part of a group called "the style." He wanted his work to show universal harmony, where all opposites are united. Universal harmony means everyone getting along with no fighting or wars. This is what he’s trying to show in this painting, Opposition of Lines Red and Yellow. This was painted in 1937, when he was 55. By this time he had made up rules for his paintings that allowed only horizontal and vertical black lines, with rectangles of primary colors and gray. What are the primary colors? What is horizontal? Vertical?
He felt so strongly about this that when one member of his group started painting diagonal lines, he quit the group. At the beginning of WWII, in 1940, Mondrian moved to New York and started painting works like "Broadway Boogie Woogie," which where named after a kind of American music, and didn’t have black lines. He died at the end of WWII. He never married and he lived alone.
Mondrian was trying to express universal harmony and balance in his paintings. But that’s not what he’s remembered for, he’s remembered as one of the first abstract painters. I remember in the 60’s when people wore sweaters and dresses that looked like this. And Saturday night we were in Komb’s Hot Dog Stand and my son Nick said "Mom, the walls in here look just like that crazy painter!" We still see things that look like Mondrian everywhere.
III Student’s Self-Expression
Today’s art project is for you to do pictures like Mondrian, using black lines and rectangles of red, yellow, blue and grey. It’s okay to cut the lines and rectangles. Use glue sticks to glue them to the white paper. One idea is to make a Halloween picture the way Mondrian would. How would he make a bat, a witch, a pumpkin, a haunted house, a ghost, using only black lines and primary color rectangles?

Craft:

We’re going to create our very own Mondrian masterpieces.

  • Using Mondrian-style grids, you will be able to create your own.

  • You will need markers in basic colors: red, yellow, blue and even green if you want.

  • You can fill in the rectangles on your grid in different colors, leaving some rectangles white if you like.

 
Additional Project Information
Additional information on Piet Mondrian

 

10/98

Pat Rohm and Linda Hutcheson

Books borrowed from interliprar Library:

Mondrian. Great Modern Masters. LaGrange Library. This book is great! Used it to show kids pictures of Mondrain’s other works.

Mondrain. The Art of Destruction. By Carol Blotkamp. Hinsdale Library. More background.