We started this lecture discussing neo Plastic works, notably Piet Mondrien’s Composition en Rouge, Bleu et Jaune. This artist was also the first person to articulate the values and elements that would go on to define this movement. Working with a completely reduced color palette and content, we saw Mondrien’s full focus on the idealized balance of the composition, which stems from the radical and eutopic belief that everything in the world had an organic, underlying logic, and we can access it with the help of art. We see the influence this belief had most clearly within architectural works. Bauhaus is a German art school, first emerged in 1919, which operates with the form-follow-function, less-is-more mindset. Dominating works such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and the American industrial buildings is a sense of striving towards pristine progress and modernity.
After the war, there was a distinct shift in the capital region of artistic works, from Paris to America, with the works of artists like Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky or Willem de Kooning starting gaining attention from the art community. Present in these artists’ (or more specifically, Pollock’s) work is the suggestion of the very process of artistic creation, leading to what would be called action paintings (or gestural abstraction). In these works, the process of creating themselves is part of the work. Other important elements are the usage of biomorphic forms, the uncertainty of space and distortion of foreground/ background. There were distinct tendencies that differed artists from each other: those that created gestural abstraction artworks and those that made chromatic abstraction artworks. One immensely important chromatic abstraction artist is Mark Rothko, whose way of applying paint creates a work that carries dimensions and a sense of development, just through the way it was perceived under certain conditions.