Friday, June 13, 2014

Paintings Of Piet Mondrian And Francis Bacon

By Darren Hartley


The most recognized Piet Mondrian paintings are abstract paintings of colored squares, rectangles and thick black lines. Piet Mondrian was a famous abstract painter, born in the Netherlands in 1872. Piet did not start out painting squares and rectangles. He only started so during the tail end of the Impressionism movement.

A unique personal style was involved in the creation of Piet Mondrian paintings. Termed neo-plasticism by Piet himself, they are not based on outside artistic influences or typical techniques. Instead, they are interpretations of deeply felt philosophical beliefs of theosophy and anthroposophy. The former is a religious mysticism which sought to help humanity achieve perfection while the latter held that the spiritual world was directly accessible through the development of the inner self.

It was to help humanity that Piet Mondrian paintings were aimed at. This help was extended through the provision of aesthetic beauty and breaking away from a representational form of painting. The early Piet Mondrian paintings were representational paintings. Slowly, they evolved into cubism, then to pure abstraction and non-representation. Finally they flourished into pure creative freedom, felt in the post-WWI war atmosphere of Paris.

The first truly original work among the Francis Bacon paintings was the Crucifixion, a small spectral painting clearly indebted to the biomorphs of Picasso. In 1944, Francis Bacon riveted the attention of both public and critics with his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. With its hot orange background and stone-colored monsters of vaguely human descent, the painting left a lasting and disquieting impression on its viewers.

An assemblage of meat carcasses and a mutilated, almost headless man beneath an umbrella is included among the Francis Bacon paintings. Francis started painting on the unprimed side of the canvas, said to be the wrong side, by 1948. The technique proved to be totally attuned to his temperature. Francis decided to stick to the technique from then on till the end of his life.

Featured in many Francis Bacon paintings of the 1960s, such as Study for Head of George Dyer, was petty criminal George Dyer, with whom Francis fell in love with after he caught him breaking into his home. Triptych featured George as he was found slumped dead in a hotel bathroom.




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