Piet Mondrian

Fine Artist

  • Born: March 7, 1872
  • Birthplace: Amersfoort, the Netherlands
  • Died: February 1, 1944
  • Place of death: New York, New York

Dutch painter

Mondrian was of paramount importance to the initiation of geometric abstraction for modern art during World War I. He was the principal voice and exemplar of neoplasticism in Dutch painting as well as one of the founders of the Dutch modern movement in architecture and design known as de Stijl. De Stijl influenced the International style in building construction during the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Area of achievement Art

Early Life

Piet Mondrian (peet MAWN-dree-ahn) was born in Amersfoort, a central Netherlands town, where his father was headmaster at a Dutch reformed grammar school. Mondrian lived only eight childhood years in Amersfoort, after which his family moved east to Winterswijk near the German border. There his father began duties as headmaster of a Calvinist primary school. Mondrian finished early formal education at that school by 1886. Of special importance for his future, he developed an interest in drawing there as a student, from self-training plus guidance from his father, who was a competent draftsman. He received his first painting instruction from an uncle, Fritz Mondriaan, a professional painter of landscapes who, though based in the Hague, spent numerous summers at his brother’s home in Winterswijk. Not surprisingly, early lessons for Mondrian from his uncle included landscape composition. Other documented training in art was received from the Doetinchem artist Johan Braet van Ueberfeldt.

By age fourteen, the young Mondrian was already consumed with the notion of becoming a painter. His father did not concur and initially prevailed, insisting that his son prepare for a stable profession. Mondrian worked diligently toward, first, a diploma to teach drawing at grammar school levels and then an additional certificate as a secondary school drawing teacher. By 1892, he taught briefly in Winterswijk but less thereafter. Still, his teaching certificates served as exemptions from preparatory courses when he was enrolled at the National Academy in Art in Amsterdam in 1892. There he joined all-day classes in painting and in 1894 added night classes in drawing.

Frustrated by the academy’s curriculum and his own money problems, Mondrian withdrew from school for a year. During 1895-1896 and for several years afterward, Mondrian intensified his interest in landscape studies, notably undramatic rural scenery. In Mondrian’s early years of academy training his approach was patient, sober, neutral, and objective regarding figuration, a manner that Mondrian carried over to his landscapes. All in all, his was hardly an early life prophetic of a brilliant career as a major figure in twentieth century modernism.

Life’s Work

Mondrian’s naturalistic paintings and his life remained relatively undistinguished from 1898 until about 1908. During this period, the channel of success for a picturesque landscape painter such as Mondrian included joining various art organizations in cities such as Amsterdam and submitting works to their frequent exhibitions. Mondrian did so, occasionally faring well, but by 1908 other forces were stirring within him and around him that began to change his painting interests forever.

That year he met the painter Jan Toorop, an exponent of Art Nouveau. Mondrian was not swayed by the sinuous excess and thick symbolism in Toorop’s work, but his light palette and immersion into theosophy intrigued Mondrian. Soon considerations about the mystical apprehension of God caused the artist to clarify his painting goals. He realized that his current search for an imitation of the divine, present in his naturalistic, or luminist, paintings, actually lay within himself. Slowly but progressively Mondrian set about painting the divine absolute without references to externalized objects.

This procedure required a different pictorial language, one faithful to his new direction yet intelligible to the art-viewing public as well. The direction was one of liberation, exploration, experimentation, and a brighter palette, and it continued up to World War I. From 1908 to 1911 and again in 1913 and 1914, Mondrian painted for long periods during summers at Domburg in the coastal area of the Netherlands called Zeeland. There he continued a preference for single motifs such as mills, lighthouses, church towers, dunes, beaches, and individual stemmed flowers. These paintings were composed of a minimum of strokes, some wide, most gestural, and, again, almost all in brighter, stronger color, leaving behind for good the dark, rather brooding spell of his previous works.

Between 1909 and 1912, at least a dozen paintings and watercolors evidence a metamorphosis wherein a flowering tree is interpreted first in the Fauve manner, next with arbitrary smoldering color, and then as a type of turgid, brittle expressionism, followed by a version as a formalized system with curving webs of crisscrossing branches with spaces infilled with flat color. The last paintings in this series were completed during a trip to Paris in 1912. In them, the tree motif was simplified still more radically into a lattice of laterally repeated branches, some ellipsoidal. At that point, what seemed a conclusion of natural synthesis became an altered visual problem begging further resolution; that is, object representation changed to a schematicized incomplete grid on a flat background.

Part of this transformation from object-oriented art to linear abstraction was the result of Mondrian’s exposure to the laboratory-like Paris development of analytical cubism by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1909 and 1911. Yet Mondrian’s own development may not have needed such contact. Whatever the case, world events affected his next potential spheres of influence. A trip home to the Netherlands in 1914 for the impending death of his father was prolonged for four years by the outbreak of World War I. The involuntary detention nevertheless had beneficial ramifications for Mondrian. He grew distant from cubism, believing that its experimental progress stopped prematurely and that it could have advanced to the logical elimination of all subject matter. In the Netherlands from 1914 to 1915, Mondrian resumed his experimental synthesis of form in sparse compositions of varied colors and line-enhanced rectangles. His goal was to achieve what he termed “pure reality” and to represent ideas by pure plastic means hence neoplasticism, in which all visual information is reduced to activities coded by colors to shapes. Reality now meant not the picture as an open hole in the wall but picture making, that is, line, color, shape, texture, composition, rhythm, balance, and the like.

Slowly formulating that position, Mondrian refined it into the concept of dynamic movement of color and shape and then enlarged on it with the idea of balanced but unequal opposition. The latter was realized by almost exclusive use of rectilinear planes rendered in primary colors and divided by black borders of right angles. Oval Composition with Bright Colors (1914) is typical of this radical approach, although a few curved lines remained. Within a year, even curvilinear marks had been eliminated, and the resolution of Mondrian’s compositions from then on reflected the rectangle of the picture plane, with architectonic structure dominant.

During this same period, Mondrian met Bart van der Leck, a painter exploring problems related to his own. Through Leck, Mondrian met artist and critic Theo van Doesburg, who was eager to launch both a new architecture and design movement and a journal to promote it. Both he called de stijl, meaning “the style.” De Stijl championed machine forms and simplicity. Essays by Mondrian were published in the journal.

Possessing nearly obsessional concentration in his search for spiritual expressions of dynamic grid oppositions, Mondrian spent the rest of his career exploring their possibilities. Much of that life (1919 to 1938) was spent in Paris, where Mondrian’s presence and active career seemed to encourage the spread of abstraction. His work in general saw the black grid simplified and become bolder, wider, and filled with a reduced palette of the primary colors plus white and gray. The archetypical example of this phase of his work remains Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue (1930).

In 1938, sensing the approach of another war in Europe, Mondrian left Paris and sailed to London, where he lived and worked for two years. With the onset of the Blitzkrieg, the artist changed countries for the last time to the United States, specifically New York City, and did so with no regrets.

In 1941, Mondrian’s work experienced another change: The black line network was exchanged for one in yellow and, in some work, for a yellow grid containing small bars of primary colors. Mondrian enthusiasts attribute the transformation to the artist’s admiration for the dense but dynamic horizontal and vertical structure of Manhattan, particularly when it is illuminated at night. Additional stimuli proved to be the accelerated pace of life and, above all, the syncopation of jazz, a music form both new and intoxicating to the artist. So fond was Mondrian of the new music that he named his last two major paintings, Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie-Woogie, both from 1942-1943, in its honor.

During this same brief time span, Mondrian was given his only one-person exhibition, thanks to the Valentine Dudensing Gallery in New York City. In late January of 1944, Mondrian developed pneumonia, and, though medically treated, he died early on February 1 at Murray Hill Hospital.

Significance

In probably no other single artist can the metamorphosis of specific naturalistic motifs into geometric abstraction be traced and studied more clearly than through Mondrian. What is more important, the transformation of his motifs was not the result of clinical deductive reasoning as they may appear, but the search for spiritual equivalents and a universal language for natural form. In his patient, methodical way, he quietly launched one of the most important arms of twentieth century nonobjective painting, that of geometric abstraction.

As a founding member of de Stijl, his ideas regarding neoplastic painting as well as geometric abstraction in sculpture and architecture were published in the Dutch post-World War I journal De Stijl. Consequently, Mondrian’s ideas were extended to Germany, where they were eagerly received by Walter Gropius during his formation of the Bauhaus. During the heyday of that astounding school of architecture, design, and art, Mondrian’s ideas were indirectly spread throughout much of Western civilization.

Reared in a milieu of landscape and cityscape painting, Mondrian had turned away from those genres by 1909. Yet his move to New York in 1940 subsequently witnessed interpretations of Manhattan important as a heroic finale to his career and highly significant in the ongoing development of abstract painting. Mondrian’s work and presence in the United States during the early 1940’s inspired emerging young painters soon to launch the major movement of abstract expressionism. Finally, Mondrian’s influence affected still later twentieth century painting movements such as color-field abstraction and hard edge abstraction (or, minimal art) as well as optical painting (or, op art).

Bibliography

Bax, Marty. Complete Mondrian. Burlington, Vt.: Lund Humphries, 2001. A comprehensive catalog of Mondrian’s works, with descriptions and arranged in four chronological periods. Includes more than three hundred color reproductions of his art and more than one thousand black-and-white reproductions.

Cooper, Harry, and Ron Spronk. Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Investigates seventeen paintings that Mondrian took from Europe to New York, where he extensively reworked them to be more “boogie-woogie.” Written to accompany an exhibition of these paintings.

Friedman, Mildred, ed. De Stijl, 1917-1931: Visions of Utopia. New York: Abbeville Press, 1982. This catalog’s essays reveal the planned interconnectedness of de Stijl’s total design and its prophecy of machine form, efficiency, and dignified simplicity.

Jaffe, Hans Ludwig C. Piet Mondrian. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970. The book combines an overview of the artist’s life, including biographical photographs, student-era paintings, and an in-depth discussion of a key series in which the tree motif evolves into a nonobjective painting mode. It includes description and analysis for most of Mondrian’s major paintings.

Janssen, Hans, and Joop M. Joosten. Mondrian, 1892-1914: The Path to Abstraction. Zwolle, the Netherlands: Waanders, 2002. Published in conjunction with an exhibition, the book focuses on the artwork Mondrian created from 1892 through 1914, before he produced the abstract grid paintings for which he is most famous.

Mondrian, Piet. Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944: Centennial Exhibition. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1971. The catalog lists 131 works dated from 1889 to 1944 and illustrates the most familiar pieces. Also includes an interview with one of Mondrian’s closest friends.

Rembert, Virginia Pitts. Piet Mondrian in the USA: The Artist’s Life and Work. Dulles, Va.: Parkstone Press, 2002. This study, with text by Rembert, explores Mondrian’s artistic output and his life experiences while living in the United States.

Seuphor, Michel. Piet Mondrian: Life and Work. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1957. A monographic study composed of a poignant text interspersed with appropriate illustrated works, most in acceptable color. The book is valuable as an explanation of Mondrian’s concepts of neoplasticism and his identification with theosophy and as an exploration of his major painting themes.

Welsh, Robert P. Piet Mondrian’s Early Career: The “Naturalistic” Periods. New York: Garland, 1977. This published dissertation addresses the artist’s art training in the 1880’s, when he came under the spell of painting styles in contemporary France. Exhaustive research is evident, covering Mondrian’s long gestation as a painter of humble landscape imagery.

White, Michael. De Stijl and Dutch Modernism. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2003. Examines the de Stijl movement’s artists and architects and the movement’s relationship to Dutch modernism.

1901-1940: 1912: Kandinsky Publishes His Theory of Abstract Art; 1917: De Stijl Advocates Mondrian’s Neoplasticism; 1918-1919: Rietveld Designs the Red-Blue Chair; 1919: German Artists Found the Bauhaus; 1934: Soviet Union Bans Abstract Art; July 19-November 30, 1937: Nazi Germany Hosts the Degenerate Art Exhibition.