Autonomy, Abstraction and Unism

Strzemiński
"Abstract art constitutes a laboratory of research in the formal domain. The result of this enters daily life as definitive components."

"A real = autonomous existence in the plastic arts: when a work of art is plastically self-sufficient; when it constitutes an end itself and does not seek justification in values that subsist beyond the picture. An item of pure art, built in accordance with its own principles, stands up beside other worldly organisms as a parallel entity, as a real being, for everything has its own laws of construction of its organism. When we build one thing, we cannot do it according to the laws and principles belonging to another thing."
-principle of unism

"Composition rests on a rhetorical model. Any composition stages a drama (thesis/ antithesis) whose resolution (synthesis) must be convincing."

Autonomous = Self governing

Bois, Y-A. (1991). Painting as Model (October Books). First Edition Edition. Massachusetts, MIT Press.


Piet Mondrian
Neoplasticism is the belief that art should not be the reproduction of real objects, but the expression of the absolutes of life.  To the artists way of thinking, the only absolutes of life were vertical and horizontal lines and the primary colors.  To this end neoplasticisist only used planar elements and the colors red, yellow, and blue.  The neoplastic movement happened in the 1910's and the two main painters of this movement where Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg.

Abstractart, Peter Mackenzie, (2000). Neoplasticism, available from: http://abstractart.20m.com/Neoplasticism.html [accessed 04.11.12]