Tondo
Russian-American painter Ilya Bolotowsky (1907–1981) was a pioneering figure of 20th-century art. He penned in his memoirs, “My own work developed gradually, not in a completely straight path, from abstraction to Neoplasticism.” It was his unyielding curiosity in geometric forms and Piet Mondrian’s art theories in Neoplasticism that guided this divergence.
The Neoplastic movement is distinguished by the exclusive use of horizontal and vertical rectangles, and adherence to the three primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—as well as the three non-colors: black, white, and gray. These colors are pure hues, devoid of any pigment variation. In contrast to Mondrian, Bolotowsky often painted the larger (non-rectangular) areas of his canvases with the primary shades, sometimes even using violet or black. He avoided the use of black horizontal lines to separate colors, typical of Neoplasticism, instead, where one color ended, the other began.
These concepts are evident in the Dorsky’s Tondo, where he exclusively used blue, red, and black against a white background. The shape provided unique advantages and disadvantages: As the viewer concentrates on the lines in the Tondo, they curve and then appear to straighten. As one’s eyes travel around a tondo, the straight edge appears to be pushing away from the picture plane. Thus, Bolotowsky used perspective to infer the three-dimensionality of the tondo shape—the foreground and background suggest depth, and his use of light and shadow on the sides indicate plasticity.
Bolotowsky taught at numerous colleges and universities. He was in residence at SUNY New Paltz between 1957–1965.
