Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: An Essay in Trialogue Form/1919-1920

Internationally recognized as a pioneer of abstract art, the founder of Neo-Plasticism, and the ideological father of the De Stijl movement, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) created both paintings and writings that embodied the spirit of modernism. Mondrian saw himself as an arch-Modernist with uncompromisingly strong ideas about what art was to be about in the next century. He viewed abstraction as the ideal artistic and spiritual direction, and argued this cause in his most important text, "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality." Written in Holland at the outset of 1919 and completed in Paris in July of that year, Mondrian's Trialogue carefully presents the artist's ideas through the voices of A Layman, A Naturalist Painter, and An Abstract-Real Painter. Abstraction contains, Mondrian proposes, the essence of what art of all the ages sought to express - relationship, harmony, repose, life force, the universal. In the Trialogue, Mondrian demonstrates the basis of his new art form in visible reality. This volume also contains Mondrian's "two urban sketches" entitled "Les Grands Boulevards" and "Little Restaurant - Palm Sunday, " which form ideal literary complements to the Trialogue.