Living in Madrid
sometimes you forget that at any one moment you are surrounded by
great artworks spanning many centuries. The golden triangle
pinpointed by the Prado, Thyssian and The Reina Sofia is one of the
largest concentration of art works in the world.
For this reason and having a
little bit more liberty we decided to CHECK OUT the Der Sthil
movement and Modrian at the Reine Sofia. It was a perfect day to do
such a thing, while it was overcast and showery outside we wandered
through this beautiful old hospital that had been converted into a
modern day monument to modern art. It reminds of the Irish Museum of
Modern Art which also had been principally a hospital. Spacious
granite corridors displays it's previous functionality and an
interior patio.
It's impossible to look at the work of the DER STHIL group and not see traces of Bauhaus , Dada , the constructivists, and so many other art , architecture and design movements of the last century. Even in February walking through this exhibition it still excited me, it's immediacy and freshness. I looked at the models and the paint and I could imagine the conversations hovering above these constructions and a pure belief in the spiritual need and motivation for art.
Der Sthil was an art movement or collective started under Theo Van Doesburg in 1917 in The Neatherlands, this group was also know as the Neoplasticism or the New Plastic Art. The movement was set up as a reaction to Modern Barroque of the Amsterdam school \ Dutch expressionist architecture.
The principal members were painters most famously Piet Modrian and Vilmos Huszar and Architects Gerrit Rietveld
The basic principals were abstraction through only primary colours and non colours | black and white and gradients\ and a reduction in the essential of forms reduced to vertical and horizontal lines.
I didn't take any notes from this exhibition but really we just wanted to stroll around and take a break from our own four walls and get lost in the art. I love these sketches above that struck me as so modern like a computer design from the eighties and the kids room based on the principles of Der Sthil.
I remember studying Piet Mondrian in college and reading how he also had designed his flat completely in right angles. These absolutisms and beliefs in art seemed to thrive at the beginning of the 20th century also in western society things were changing so quickly. I remember reading a book about the relationship between space and time from 1890 until 1918. The beginning of GMT \ Greenwich Mean Time\ how industrialisation and economics in a way brutalised people and speeded our sense of time.
After the breakup of the Der Sthil movement Mondrian continued working on the basis of vertical and horizontal lines in primary colours and still today these paintings IN THE FLESH emit creativity and modernity. This idea of stripping something down to it's fundamentals and maintaining this geometric abstraction in painting is a live and well in modern art and although being abstract expresses emotion and transendence.
The above 'painting' is actually the majority part in coloured tape on canvas and it's immediately recognizable as a Mondrian. I guess this was the beginning of the signature artists where their style is their logo. Still even with all this exposure the work is still a pleasure to spend time with.
When Mondrian managed to get to New York through Peggy Guggenheim he was amazed by the spectacle and energy built on a grid system of 'MANZANAS' or blocks an entire city living in a grid. For him it was modernity defined and also it's music, art there was spiritual through jazz and from here he could discard the decadence of Europe and begin again.
Broadway Boogie Woogie 1942 -
This painting just sings to me, it's fantastic although it wasn't in the show it's a painting that portrays perfectly the atmosphere of New York event today but more so I guess in the forties when Modrian arrived.
These paintings and the general style and design of Der Sthil are like the smart phone to millenials, it's impossible to imagine a world without them where primary colours and right angles replaced the decorative and floral backdrop that was it's predecessor. I wonder could there be such a dramatic change again? Will the technological revolution transform out aesthetics to the same degree or will we flatline on algorithms?
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