Furthermore, Mondrian openly acknowledged the Futurists in his writings: in the treatise and pamphlet, as well as in the 1921 essay entitled "The Manifestation of Neo-Plasticism in Music and the Italian Futurists' Bruiteurs." Mondrian did not completely agree with the Futurists, but he approved of them and lauded their attempts in advancing the arts.
However, Mondrian himself had, in fact, already suggested the possibility of Neoplastic literature in his pamphlet, Neo-Plasticism, after having studied the literary works of Futurism and Dada (The New Art 132).
Some bore images of geometric figures: grids, squares, rectangles, diamonds, parallelograms, perhaps inspired by the Artists of the Constructivism and
Neo-Plasticism (Albers, van Docs burg, Mondrian, and so on).
A Dutch artist whose work is rooted in
Neo-Plasticism might be suspected of seeking facile identification with an artistic commonplace, a sort of visiting card for a foreign audience.
For the cover of the catalogue accompanying his exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art," Barr employed a tangle of swooping arrows--his own brand of "spaghetti and meatballs"--to depict the rapid explosion of overlapping and occasionally competing avant-gardes (Cubism, Futurism,
Neo-Plasticism, etc.) amid floating, misfit categories ("Machine Esthetic," "Near-Eastern Art," "Negro Sculpture," etc.).
Piet Mondrian, "The Manifestation of
Neo-Plasticism in Music and the Italian Futurists' Bruiteurs" (1921), in The New Art, the New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed.
Moving from the "origins" of Malevich (and Lyubov Popova and Rozanova) to the endpoints of Richter and Whiteread, Fer's narrative encompasses the history of twentieth-century avant-garde art: ranging from century's beginning to century's end, from Greenbergian Modernism to that which comes after it, from Suprematism,
Neo-Plasticism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Eccentric Abstraction and Minimalism, and on to our own moment, moving between Europe and the United States, painting, collage and sculpture, artists male and female, she covers the canon of abstraction from end to end, center to center, movement to movement, across media and gender: Malevich, Mondrian, Arp, Miro, Pollock, Hesse, Judd, Richter, and Whiteread.
However, his texts only exceptionally deal directly with the specifics of his painting: the theory of Neo-Plasticism covers all aspects of human activity, painting being only one (the "purest," of course).
While some of the early sections of this "trialogue," as Mondrian called it, were written in Holland during the late spring of 1919, at a time when he was struggling with the use of a modular allover grid, its last parts were composed in the early summer of 1920, just when he was laying the foundation of Neo-Plasticism. Needless to say, the text echoes the dramatic change that occurred in his painting (notably with regard to color) during this one-year gap, but one can easily miss these echoes if one does not measure them against what remained stable in the theory.