New York City I

New York City I

New York City I, or rather the series of works later united under the title New York City, marks the start of a brand-new stage in Mondrian’s work. The black lines have disappeared along with the rectangles of primary color, which because the 1918 Structure: Shade Planes with Gray Contours had actually created a strong flat totality with the lines and the white that had formerly been the history. Instead, lines in the primaries – yellow, however additionally red and also blue – pass through the square canvas, interweaving with each other.

For the most part, the yellow lines cross those of the various other shades, but occasionally, in the most refined means, the red and also blue lines cross the yellow. Yet this design does not give rise to an illusionary space; the tinted bands over- and also underlap one another on the surface, prior to the eyes of the viewer. It is quite affordable to accept Michel Seuphor’s tip as well as quality this result of going across as well as interlacing to Mondrian’s technique of conceiving and also working out these images: he utilized strips of tinted paper and relocated them around on the canvas to get the impact he wanted. In this way, he practically immediately introduced the crossovers and the idea of intertwined tinted bands.

This strategy was one of the factors for the adjustment in Mondrian’s design and fashion of working after his arrival in the United States, just as the technique noted a change in between the analytic and artificial stages of the cubism of Pablo Picasso and also Georges Braque. The various other factors for the adjustment, which some of his European followers considered as a separation from his very own concepts, was the internal liberation he really felt after his transfer to America. The atmosphere he encountered there was not filled up in any way at times with a feeling of hazard as well as dread, however with solid confidence in last success over the tyranny that had actually driven Mondrian from Paris. Therefore his images of the American duration have a different tonality, insignificant as it were, compared to the mournful canvases, dominated by black lines, of completion of his remain in Europe.

In the brisk allegro rhythm of these paintings, there is a new feeling for harmony, which Mondrian can have found out just in his brand-new surroundings: the rhythm of the modern city. In the very early days of De Stijl, Mondrian as well as his buddies had aimed to have the human environment, the wonderful city, established by the legislation of harmony. Currently, an example of this new social pattern, New York City, had a radical influence on his painting.