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Lot Essay
In 1919, at the age of nineteen, César Domela decided to devote his life to art and left his native Amsterdam to seek solitude in Switzerland, settling initially in Ascona and then in Bern. An autodidact, Domela's interest in art can be traced back to a short stay in Paris in 1914, where he came into contact with the work of the sculptor Henri Laurens. However, it was the profound impact of the death of his father, the leading Dutch Socialist of his day, which prompted Domela's decision to pursue his chosen vocation. Isolated from the prevailing artistic trends and theories, Domela soon began to experiment with abstraction, abnegating realism in favour of pure, geometric forms. His 1923 visit to Berlin brought him into contact with like-minded artists, and at the end of 1923, in Paris his introduction to Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian at the Café du Dôme by his friends Henri Laurens and Christian Zervos was to have a decisive influence over his work for the remainder of the 1920s.
The colour and space theories expounded by the founders of De Stijl movement in their 1918 manifesto not only resonated with Domela's own aesthetic but also with his father's intellectual preoccupations. The search for an essential truth in the arts and in social forms was fundamental to their vision, and it was believed that this truth could only be revealed through the use of the most direct, elemental means: primary colours, rectangular forms and asymmetrical compositions. Composition néo-plastique no. 5 O exemplifies Domela's assimilation of these ideals, but also testifies to his own personal vision, more aligned with that of van Doesburg, whose ideological split with Mondrian in 1924 issued from the former's proposition that the diagonal should be introduced as a dynamic counterbalance to the vertical. Domela energizes the present work with oblique lines, but rejects a mathematically rigid construct as promulgated by van Doesburg, whose diagonals were strictly placed along a forty-five degree angle. Domela places his lines intuitively, allowing them to extend past the parameters of the canvas plane onto the painted frame, a characteristic of his work from the late 1920s. H.L.C. Jaffé compares Composition néo-plastique no. 5 O to Mondrian's work: 'The linear structure exists on a different plane than that of the colors and creates a spatiality as flat and as incalculable as possible. Moreover, the composition here is wilfully divided into two parts, whereas the same comparison cannot be applied to Mondrian's works in spite of all the dialectic contrasts between horizontals and verticals; the lines always create a chord with Mondrian, but with Domela, the chord …is based upon the intersection of two parts, of two melodies conducted independently' (H.L.C. Jaffé, Domela, Paris, 1980, p. 171).
The colour and space theories expounded by the founders of De Stijl movement in their 1918 manifesto not only resonated with Domela's own aesthetic but also with his father's intellectual preoccupations. The search for an essential truth in the arts and in social forms was fundamental to their vision, and it was believed that this truth could only be revealed through the use of the most direct, elemental means: primary colours, rectangular forms and asymmetrical compositions. Composition néo-plastique no. 5 O exemplifies Domela's assimilation of these ideals, but also testifies to his own personal vision, more aligned with that of van Doesburg, whose ideological split with Mondrian in 1924 issued from the former's proposition that the diagonal should be introduced as a dynamic counterbalance to the vertical. Domela energizes the present work with oblique lines, but rejects a mathematically rigid construct as promulgated by van Doesburg, whose diagonals were strictly placed along a forty-five degree angle. Domela places his lines intuitively, allowing them to extend past the parameters of the canvas plane onto the painted frame, a characteristic of his work from the late 1920s. H.L.C. Jaffé compares Composition néo-plastique no. 5 O to Mondrian's work: 'The linear structure exists on a different plane than that of the colors and creates a spatiality as flat and as incalculable as possible. Moreover, the composition here is wilfully divided into two parts, whereas the same comparison cannot be applied to Mondrian's works in spite of all the dialectic contrasts between horizontals and verticals; the lines always create a chord with Mondrian, but with Domela, the chord …is based upon the intersection of two parts, of two melodies conducted independently' (H.L.C. Jaffé, Domela, Paris, 1980, p. 171).