Piet Mondrian, original name Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, was a Dutсh painter and art theorist of the 20th century. On his way from standard figurative painting to the combinations of simple geometric shapes and basic color palette, he was an influential figure in the development of the abstract art and stood at the origin of one of its conceptual offshoots, the De Stijl movement.
Background
Ethnicity:
Mondrian's ancestors, including Christian Dirkzoon Monderyan, lived in The Hague as from 1670.
Piet Mondrian was born on March 7, 1872 in Amersfoort, Utrecht, Netherlands. He was the second child of five kids in the family of Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Sr., a trained drawing teacher and an amateur draftsman who headed the local Calvinist primary school, and Johanna Christina de Kok. Mondrian's uncle, Frits, was an accomplished landscapist associated with the Hague school.
Education
A son and nephew of artists, Piet Mondrian was raised in a stable yet creative environment and was encouraged to study art and music from a very early age. Both father and uncle gave him the necessary assistance when he began to study drawing in 1876.
Piet had a strong intention to become a painter but first, following advice of his family, he received a diploma in education which gave him the right to teach drawing at secondary schools. In 1892, Mondrian enrolled at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten (the Academy of Fine Arts) in Amsterdam. He learned drawing from the model, genre painting and copied Old Masters during the three-year studies at the Academy. The works he produced at the time showed influence of The Hague school.
The start of Piet Mondrian's career can be counted from 1893 when he exhibited his works for the first time within the Dutch art society Kunstliefde (Art Lovers), the member of which he had become. The second exhibition followed four years later. In his early works, Mondrian adhered to the trends of art predominant in the Netherlands at the time. He produced landscapes and still lifes of subdued hues and picturesque lighting effects choosing the meadows and polders around Amsterdam as the main subject matters.
Mondrian's painting had markedly changed after his trip to Brabant, Belgium, in the early 1900s. The landscapes that he produced since then demonstrated the growing interest in the compositional structure rather than in the conventional values of light and shade. This rhythmic framework that Mondrian discovered would transform into pure abstraction in his subsequent works within the course of time.
The following changes of Piet Mondrian's creations were influenced by the Dutch Luminist and Post-Impressionist movements. Two Amsterdam exhibitions, a 1905 exhibition featuring Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh, and the Quadrennial Exhibition of 1907 with the Post-Impressionist works of Kees van Dongen, Otto van Rees and Jan Sluijters, pushed Mondrian to incorporate new values of the movement in his own art. The forceful expression and use of color, inherent to Post-Impressionism, are apparent in such works of the period as Red Cloud and Woods near Oele, a vigorous large-scale canvas that marked the artist's departure from the national tradition of Dutch painting.
Adopting several traits of Post-Impressionism and Pointillism, including the technique of Georges Seurat, Piet Mondrian went ahead and reduced his palette to the basic hues, that is evident in Windmill in Sunlight, executed mainly in yellow, red and blue, and in The Red Tree. Mondrian's works inspired by Luminists were demonstrated in a major group exhibition organized in 1909 at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum. The show firmly established the artist as part of the Dutch avant-garde.
Under the influence of the Theosophical Society which Piet Mondrian joined that same year, he began to free the objects in his paintings from naturalistic representation. These objects turned into the formal components of the overall harmony of his canvases, or, in other terms, the material elements started to blend with the overall spiritual message of his work. His Evolution of 1910, a triptych of three standing human figures, is a vivid example of painting based more on forms and visual rhythms than on nature. In 1910, Mondrian's Luminist works received good reviews at the St. Lucas Exhibition in Amsterdam, and a year later, one of his more abstract paintings was accepted by the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, his first step to the international recognition.
Active in avant-garde circles, Piet Mondrian was influenced very much by the widespread attachment of the Dutch artistic groups to the trends of the Cubist painters in the early 1910s. Mondrian's first encounter with the works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1911 was so much impressive for him that he traveled to Paris where he took up residence in the Montparnasse district. The traits of Cubism, including muted grey and yellow/brown hues and schematized framework, are evident in two versions of Still Life with Gingerpot or The Gray Tree.
The only precept of the movement that Mondrian threw away was the three-dimensional illusionistic depth. He preferred to emphasize the flatness of the painting surface instead. The Cubist period of Mondrian lasted from 1912 to 1917. In 1913, the artist began final and irreversible movement to the complete abstraction. The final stage of the period became the ultimate 1917 version of Pier and Ocean demonstarted at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller.
Piet Mondrain came back to the Netherlands in 1914. Three years later, along with three of his workmates, Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Vilmos Huszar, he founded the art periodical and the movement of De Stijl. The group embraced all the principles that Mondrian had elaborated and accumulated on the path of his creative formation, including the complete rejection of visually perceived reality as subject matter and the restriction of a pictorial language to its most basic elements of the straight line, primary colors and the neutrals of black, white and gray. The term of Neoplasticism was coined by the painter and revealed through the pages of the periodical.
After the end of World War I, Piet Mondrian came back to Paris in 1919 but still maintained his close cooperation with De Stijl. A year later, he published his theories in the local booklet Le Néo-plasticisme. It was during this tenure in France that he produced his most iconic abstract canvases, with which his name is usually associated. However, it was only about 1925 that Piet Mondrian was truly recognized as the great contributor to modernism, and his works began to be acquired by well-known European and American collections.
Piet Mondrian was a rare exhibitor throughout the early 1930s but still kept his affiliation with influential international groups of artists, like Cercle et Carré or Abstraction-Création, which promoted and exhibited abstract art. In 1934, Mondrian got acquainted with the American artist Harry Holtzman and the English painter Ben Nicholson. Four years later, fleeing from the imminent threat of the war, he relocated to London, where he stayed before his next relocation, in 1940, this time to New York City. While there, the artist was largely supported by many members of the American artistic avant-garde, including a well-known art collector Peggy Guggenheim, in whose art galleries he regularly exhibited.
Piet Mondrian enlarged his pictorial vocabulary throughout the 1930s, by incorporating in his canvases such elements as double and then colored lines. Such cheerful moods are seen in his late paintings, New York City I and Broadway Boogie Woogie, presented to the public in 1943. Victory Boogie Woogie, began a year earlier, remained unfinished because of the artist's death.
Tableau 3 with Orange-Red, Yellow, Black, Blue and Gray
Evening at Weesperzijde Sun
Windmill in the Gein
Broadway Boogie Woogie
Lighthouse in Westkapelle
Composition in Color A
Trees by the Gein at Moonrise
Amaryllis
Composition with Grid IX
Moored Ships Sun
The Red Mill
Along the Amstel
Going Fishing
Wood with Beech Trees
Self Portrait
Composition N. 1 with Red and Blue
Portrait of a Girl with Flowers
Sun
Composition with Blue
Polder Landscape with a Train and a Small Windmill on the Horizon
Untitled
Untitled
Farm Sun
Gable Farm with Trees
Head
Lozenge Composition with Red, Black, Blue and Yellow
Meandering Landscape with River
Passionflower
Stammer Mill with Streaked Sky
Composition N. 11: London with Blue, Red and Yellow
Geinrust Farm with Isolated Tree
Irrigation Ditch with Mature Willow
Composition No.10
Victory Boogie Woogie
Tableau I
White Rose in a Glass
Flowers Sun
Picture No. III
Alberi
Composition No. III Blanc-Jaune
Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow
River View with a Boat Sun
Woods near Oele
Composition with Yellow Patch
New York City I
View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers
Place de la Concorde
Triangulated Farmhouse Facade with Polder in Blue
Dune IV
Composition with Oval in Color Planes II
Anemones in a Vase
Untitled
Composition III with Blue, Yellow and White
Dune Landscape
Lonely Tree at the Gein Sun
Composition with Grid VII
Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray and Blue
Study for Blue Apple Tree Series
Schinkelbuurtje Sun
Trafalgar Square
Calves in a Field Bordered by Willow Trees
Composition C (No.III) with Red, Yellow and Blue
Composition A
Farm at Duivendrecht
Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black
Still Life with Sunflower
Mill of Heeswijk Sun
Composition: Light Color Planes with Grey Contours
On the Lappenbrink
Lozenge Composition 3: Lines Blue Gray Yellow
Evening. Red Tree
The Gray Tree
Composition 2
At the Amstel Sun
Mill in the Evening
Village Church
Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue
Church Tower at Domburg
View of Winterswijk
Still Life with Gingerpot 1
Woman and Child in front of a Farm
Still Life with Gingerpot 2
Evolution
Self Portrait
Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue
Religion
Being a son of the man, who belonged to the Protestant orthodox circle, that had emerged around the conservative Calvinist politician Abraham Kuyper, Piet Mondrian was raised in the tradition of Calvinism.
Views
An accomplished artist, Piet Mondrian was also a good art theorist for whom art and philosophy were closely linked. The search of universal extreme beauty and harmony guided his philosophical and spiritual invistigations.
Both his art and his ideas on it were influenced by theosophy. A 1910 painting Evolution, which makes reference to the Buddhist and Theosophist cycle of death and rebirth, is a vivid example of this.
Quotations:
"Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man."
"The emotion of beauty is always obscured by the appearance of the object. Therefore, the object must be eliminated from the picture."
"I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects."
"I don't want pictures, I want to find things out."
"All the time I'm driven to the spiritual. Through Theosophy I became aware that art could provide a transition to the finer regions, which I will call the spiritual realm."
Membership
Piet Mondrian joined the art society Kunstliefde (Art Lovers) in Utrecht in the early 1890s. In 1909, the artist became a member of the Dutch unit of the Theosophical Society, an influential spiritual institution of the time. He was also a member of the American Abstract Artists organization beginning from the late 1930s.
Theosophical Society
,
Netherlands
1909
American Abstract Artists
,
United States
Kunstliefde Art Society
,
Netherlands
Personality
Piet Mondrian was described by his contemporaries as a man who preferred solitude to the noisy public life. However, he enjoyed the company of women and adored going out dancing with friends. The artist attended dance classes all his life. Charleston was his favorite dance movement, and jazz was his beloved style of music.
Physical Characteristics:
Piet Mondrian had a mild form of dyslexia.
Quotes from others about the person
Meyer Schapiro, an art historian: "Even where the elements are perfectly regular, the order of the whole may be extremely elusive. The precise grid of black lines in a painting by Mondrian, so firmly ordered, is an open and unpredictable whole without symmetry or commensurable parts. The example of his austere art has educated a younger generation in the force and niceties of variation with the minimum of elements."
Interests
theosophy, dance
Philosophers & Thinkers
M. H. J. Schoenmaekers
Artists
Pablo Picasso, Theo van Doesburg, Georges Braque
Music & Bands
jazz
Connections
Piet Mondrian remained a bachelor all his life. The artist had an affair with a daughter of a Dutch poet Dop Bles, Lily Bles, which started in 1929. Lily who was thirty-seven years younger than Mondrian rejected his marriage proposal in 1932.
According to official data, Piet Mondrian had no children.
Piet Mondrian: Life and Work
The volume brings together more than 230 superb paintings with documentary images from the artist's life.
2015
Mondrian: Flowers
The book presents the flower paintings of Piet Mondrian and explores their contribution to a broader understanding of his life and work.
1991
Piet Mondrian: The Studios
A unique exploration of the kinetic yet orderly work of abstract artist Piet Mondrian, inspired by the cities that influenced him.
2015
Piet Mondrian
The volume briefly recounts the life and career of the Dutch painter and shows and discusses a selection of his major works.
Piet Mondrian: The Complete Writings
The book aims to present Mondrian's essays on the subject of art and society as he wrote them, going back to the original sources of all of his manuscripts, typescripts and personal papers.