Piet Mondrian Paintings And Francis Bacon Paintings

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 dynamic 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.

Francis Bacon paintings turned traditional paintings of people inside out, with grotesquely distorted faces and twisted body parts. Some of the most famous of these paintings were inspirations from the old master artworks, including Head VI, based on the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by the Spanish artist, Diego Velazquez.

There are a number of Francis Bacon paintings that stood apart in exhibitions. A prime example would be Head VI, a 1949 creation. Featuring a sensuous purple cape, it was actually a variation on Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X. With obsessive integrity, Francis mined the theme throughout the succeeding decade. This dependency on other artists' work was expressed in the form of reproductions. Rather than limiting Francis, it actually encouraged him to take on extravagant licensing in his art.




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