ABSTRACT
the significance of the movement associated in its beginnings with the Dutch review De Stijl undoubtedly lies in the fact that it carried to a logical conclusion certain implications of Cubism. When Mondrian went to Paris in 1910 Juan Gris had already established the priority of the abstract composition (against the priority of the object to be analysed). But Mondrian was quick to realize that neither Gris, nor Picasso, nor Léger, had followed to its end the path they had chosen. It had led them to the banks of a dyke which they then refused to cross. Beyond the dyke was an undiscovered country—a realm of “pure reality”, and Mondrian was determined to reach it. But “pure reality” was only to be attained by means of “pure plastics”, that is to say, by means of forms unconditioned by subjective feeling and conception. The artist was compelled to eliminate all the variable and transient elements of perceptual experience—“to reduce natural forms to the constant elements of form, and natural colour to primary colour”. Pure reality could only be apprehended by intellectual or intuitive processes; subjective states of feeling, such as are evoked by the particularities of form and the colours of nature, obscure pure reality.
