In the framework of the art class, the pupils of the CM2 A class visited the K20 Art Museum to learn about the painter Piet Mondrian and his work. The museum traces the artist’s career from his early naturalistic compositions to his later abstract works.
In the classroom, pupils used their imagination to create their own Mondrian-style animal key rings.
Abla and Léonore Erell and Maïlys report:
“Here are the different stages of our project:
1. First of all, we drew the outline of our favourite animal on a piece of paper.
2. Then we cut out the shape of the animal.
3. We were given a piece of hardening plasticine which we flattened.
4. We put our model on the hardening clay and cut out the clay with a small plastic knife. We now had our shaped animal.
5. We made a hole in our creation.
You will understand why later…Read on!
6. While waiting for the clay to harden, we drew perpendicular and parallel lines (using a ruler and a square) on our ” scrap animal ” in the Mondrian way.
7. We coloured the rectangles with primary colours, red, blue and yellow with a felt-tip pen.
That’s it, we had our model ready to reproduce on our hardening clay!
8. After a day or two (the clay needed to harden!), we carefully and accurately reproduced this model on our animal model.
And here is our last step: we made little Brazilian lanyards (with our favourite colours) and slid them into the hole.
And there it is!”
« I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. » – Piet Mondrian – the painter capable of sublimating reality through the sheer force of geometric lines and primary colours, red, yellow and blue.
Theophile and Matthias tell us:
We went by tram to see the Piet Mondrian exhibition at K20 in Düsseldorf. We had a guide who was bilingual.
We discovered the painting New York City 1 which has been hanging upside down for 77 years. If you were to turn the painting over now, gravity would pull it in a different direction, so it will continue to hang upside down.
We went to a room where we could manipulate tape to make art on the walls and we listened to boogie-woogie music. You can recognize the rhythm of this music in the painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie 1942. This work shows the artist’s fascination with the theme of the city, but also with the energy of the rhythms.
Mondrian was influenced by Fauvism and by Vincent van Gogh, as shown in the painting ‘The Red Tree’ 1908-1910.
One of the things that surprised us was that Mondrian did not only paint geometrical shapes but also beautiful landscapes at different seasons.
