Ilya Bolotowsky - Verticals, Horizontals and Primaries

Ilya Bolotowsky - Diamond Blue, Black, Red, White, 1971 - Acrylic on linen 50 1/2 x 51 1/8 in. (128.3 x 130.0 cm) - The Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest, 1981, Smithsonian, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (click photo for larger image)Russian-born American painter, Ilya Bolotowsky (1907-1981), was a practitioner of Neoplasticism--a Dutch movement founded (and named) by Piet Mondrian. Neoplasticism is a rigid form of abstraction, which dictates that a canvas must be sectioned into rectangles, by horizontal and vertical lines, and colored using a very limited palette. Neoplasticists believed that art should not be the representation of real objects, but the expression of the absolutes of life. Their “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.