TV series production: Masterpieces Revisited – Piet Mondrian »Composition with Red, Black, Blue, Yellow and Grey«
A grid framework in black, designed with bright rectangular colour fields in the primary colours red, blue and yellow. Rearranged again and again, abstract. Everyone knows them, has seen them hundreds of times in different variations. Why have these pictorial compositions, of all things, become so engrained in our everyday lives? Their recognition value is immense, regardless of the context in which they are seen. Every icon of art has its own history and its own background that has made it a classic.
His inclination towards theosophy, his internalisation of Goethe's theory of colour and the principles of Cubism ultimately formed Mondrian's basis for his famous composition with red, black, yellow, blue and grey, which he painted in 1921. Mondrian placed monochrome areas of colour next to each other in sparsely distributed rectangles, which he delimited from each other with black lines. Mondrian's aim was to eliminate the artist's handwriting, which was associated with an individual brushstroke, and instead depict a philosophical approach.
Concept of the TV series
A journey through Europe to the icons of the history of art
Ten paintings that everyone knows. Ten painters and their biographies. Ten masterpieces of art history. Hundreds of thousands times quoted, reproduced and received. In the series »Masterpieces Revisited« we travel to the most famous museums in Europe, show their most famous works and try a new approach to each.
What are the characteristics of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa to be an icon? Or the scream of Edvard Munch? Advertisers, designers, artists and art historians tell us why the old masterpieces are still very modern. They show us their interpretations and talk with us about their motivations.
In the ten-part TV series »Masterpieces Revisited« the Berlin film production Basiliscus Film dedicates ten pictures on behalf of Deutsche Welle, which gained cult status and our camera team made an extraordinary journey across Europe to the most famous paintings in art history.
