"Uniting Contrasts; Exploring the Works of Ammi Phillips & Piet Mondrian"- Princess Hickmond

The early nineteenth century was an inventive period in art history. Progressive creative and social movements occurred in reaction to the war, technological advancements, science, and the social injustices of the time.  This is shown in the work of artists like Piet Mondrian who detracts from earlier conventions of art making and begin creating unique, revolutionary works. However, some painters were still painting portraits that showcase the lifestyles of men and women during this era.  For example, artists like Ammi Phillips employ symbolism in their paintings to depict the philosophy of women and children during the early nineteenth century. This work will compare the formal and conceptual aspects of Mondrian’s painting Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue and Phillips’ Girl in Pink and how each painting documents the livelihood of men and women living during the early nineteenth century.

As previously stated, several artistic movements were generated during the early nineteenth century. Dutch De Stijl, in particular, was one of the most transcendent and influential artistic efforts of this era.  Like Russian Constructivists, these post World War II artists and designers wanted to create a universal, revolutionary visual language through an abstract, simple, and reductive approach to color and geometry.  This intellectual vocabulary allowed for them to create a transcendent style; in fact, they used these elements to convey the idea of structured balance and harmony throughout their works in hopes to inspire balance and harmony in the lives of the audience.  Architecture like Schroder House and Gerrit Rietveld’s Chair are three-dimensional examples of how the attributes practiced by Mondrian and his contemporaries.  The formal quality of each work follows the narrative they are trying to communicate. However, there are artists that didn’t negate from the traditional conventions of this time period.

Concurrently, artists like Phillips were still depicting their daily lives and conditions at this time through symbolic paintings and portraiture. For example, some artists chose to represent childhood, more specifically, the stages of girlhood; as a result, these paintings reflect how children were generally perceived and how gender roles and subservience were introduced early on. These artists weren’t concerned with creating a logical, objective visual language. Instead, they were primarily focused own presenting their subjective interpretation of existence dyring the nineteenth century. For instance, boys and girls were dressed androgynously until boys were breached at the age of five. Consequently, artists present young boys and girls of this era in similar garb and frequently use symbolic objects such as whips and flowers to differentiate the genders.  Also, boys were presented outside while girls were being depicted in interior, domestic realms; this is a direct reference to the women’s preconceived role as a housewife and mother. Nonetheless, there are a few paintings like Erastus Salisbury‘s painting, Mrs. Paul Smith Palmer and her Twins, where it’s still difficult to comprehend which child male and which is female.  Like the artists’ objectives, the formal qualities of their works also differ.


Unlike Phillips' work Girl In Pink, Mondrian’s forms in Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue were functional, structured, and non-representational. Phillips' work Girl in Pink uses her work to present the girl, her function, and how she relates to girls and women of this time, through symbolism. He uses strictly geometric forms to create dynamic asymmetrical balance.  He also reduces his color palette to primary colors, grey, and black that poses the challenge of unifying these pure, conflicting colors while maintaining a harmonious equilibrium. Phillips' work Girl in Pink uses representational objects such as a strawberry on her lap and the pearls to signify the girl’s fertility and femininity. These symbols are helpful when associating this painting with her other work Boy in Red where he’s holding a hammer to indicate his strength and masculinity; these works are prime examples of how the artists utilize symbolism in order to present the difference between genders, the prevailing gender roles, and references the era when it took place through their clothing.  In addition, Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue is abstract and avant-garde seeing that it departs from principles utilized by artists like Phillips. He reduces image to the barest necessities which makes it void of elaborative detail or any elements that would reference to a specific era; this timeless, modern quality of his work is one of numerous grounds for why we still reference the painting in contemporary design. Nonetheless, Girl in Pink is a generic, stylized, and more intuitive. For example, there’s no sense three-dimensionality, inaccurate proportion, and the facial structure is more of a universal, symbolic expression versus depicting a specific person.  Though the works contrast visually, the conceptual fragment of their works are comparable.

Both created their works with their target audience, European men, in mind. The dogmatic abstraction of Dutch De Stijl’s visual vocabulary was rendered with the elite male in mind. Phillips' work addresses the male prospector by subliminally noting her fertility, which in turns, alludes to her eventual role as a mother and house wife. This subservient portrayal of women and girls wasn’t the only way that women and girls portrayed at the time. However, this is how most male European artists chose to depict them. Phillips and Mondrian also both depict the philosophy of certain men and women of the time. As previously stated, Dutch De Stijl was reaction to the chaos and advancement that was occurring at the time. They believed that as artist, they were socially responsible and should make works that help combat the conditions at the time. Consequently, they used their principle to communicate harmony and balance and attempted to propel their notions of these values in the lives of their viewers. Like Mondrian, Phillips' work imparts the principles and philosophies of certain people during the nineteenth century.  Girl in Pink directly notes the how children were reared, the manner in which they were trained for their preconceived function in society and/or the domestic realm, and how artists approached their subject manner intuitively through figurative imagery.

"Uniting Contrasts; Exploring the Works of Ammi Phillips & Piet Mondrian"

Phillips and Mondrian are two of the countless artists that utilized this liberated, eclectic period during the early nineteenth century. These two represent only two of the various movements that lead to the simple, reductive, abstract, minimalist, and most importantly, functional visual language that makes up modernism and the inventive methods ascertained by the teachers and pupils at Bauhaus.  Though artists of opposing movement may seem too distinctive to present a relationship between their work and the artistic movements their associated with. Nevertheless, there’s always a connection that can be made between the two. Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue and Girl in Pink differ formally but the conceptual aspects are very similar in regards to presenting one’s beliefs and/or reacting to the societal circumstances; as a result, both act as historical sources that allow viewers, especially artists and designers, to refer back to in order to learn about the historical, social, and artistic context of life during the early nineteenth century. These works are still prominent today and are still revered in institutions like the Newark Museum.

Princess A. Hickmond

Work Cited

Hunter, Jane. How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Print.

Hunter, Sam, John M. Jacobus, and Daniel Wheeler. Modern Art. [Upper Saddle River, N.J.]: Prentice Hall, 2004. Print.

Margolin, Victor. The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997. Print.