Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian, original name Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan,

(born March 7, 1872, Amersfoort, Netherlands—died February 1,
1944, New York, New York, U.S.), painter who was an important
leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major
exponent of the Dutch abstract art movement known as De
Stijl (“The Style”). In his mature paintings, Mondrian used the
simplest combinations of straight lines, right angles, primary
colours, and black, white, and gray. The resulting works possess an
extreme formal purity that embodies the artist’s spiritual belief in
a harmonious cosmos.

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Early life and works
Pieter was the second child of Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Sr., who
was an amateur draftsman and headmaster of a Calvinist primary
school in Amersfoort. The boy grew up in a stable yet creative
environment; his father was part of the Protestant orthodox circle
that formed around the conservative Calvinist politician Abraham
Kuyper, and his uncle, Frits Mondriaan, belonged to the Hague
school of landscape painters. Both uncle and father gave him
guidance and instruction when, at age 14, he began to study
drawing.

Mondrian was determined to become a painter, but at the

insistence of his family he first obtained a degree in education; by
1892 he was qualified to teach drawing in secondary schools. That
same year, instead of looking for a teaching position, he
took painting lessons from a painter in a small town not far from
Winterswijk, where his family resided, and then moved
to Amsterdam to register at the Rijksacademie. He became a
member of the art society Kunstliefde (“Art Lovers”) in Utrecht,
where his first paintings were exhibited in 1893, and in the
following year he joined the two local artist societies in
Amsterdam. During this period he continued to attend evening
courses at the academy for drawing, impressing his professors
with his self-discipline and effort. In 1897 he exhibited a second
time.

Up to the turn of the century, Mondrian’s paintings followed the

prevailing trends of art in the Netherlands: landscape and still-
life subjects chosen from the meadows and polders around
Amsterdam, which he depicted using subdued hues and
picturesque lighting effects. In 1903 he visited a friend
in Brabant (Belgium), where the calm beauty and clean lines of the
landscape proved to be an important influence on him. When he
stayed on in Brabant the following year, he experienced a period of
personal and artistic discovery; by the time he returned to
Amsterdam in 1905, his art had visibly changed. The landscapes
he began to paint of the surroundings of Amsterdam, mainly of the
Gein River, show a pronounced rhythmic framework and lean
more toward compositional structure than toward the traditional
picturesque values of light and shade. This vision of harmony and
rhythm, achieved through line and colour, would develop toward
abstraction in later years, but during this period his painting still
remained more or less within the traditional boundaries of
contemporary Dutch art.
Mondrian, Piet: Farm Along the River Gein
Farm Along the River Gein, oil on canvas on board by Piet Mondrian, date unknown; in a
private collection.

In a private collection

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Influence of Post-Impressionists and Luminists

In 1907 Amsterdam sponsored the Quadrennial Exhibition,
featuring such painters as Kees van Dongen, Otto van Rees, and
Jan Sluijters, who were Post-Impressionists using pure colours in
bold, nonliteral ways. Their work was strongly influenced by the
forceful expression and use of colour in the art of Post-
Impressionist Vincent van Gogh, whose work had been featured in
a large exhibition in Amsterdam in 1905. Such daring use of colour
was reflected in Mondrian’s Red Cloud, a rapidly executed sketch
from 1907. By the time he painted Woods near Oele in 1908, new
values began to appear in his work, including a linear movement
that was somewhat reminiscent of the Norwegian painter Edvard
Munch and a colour scheme—based on hues of yellow, orange,
blue, violet, and red—that was suggestive of the palette of
contemporary German Expressionist painters. With this vigorous
painting of considerable size, Mondrian broke away from the
national tradition of Dutch painting.

His new style was reinforced by his acquaintance with the Dutch
artist Jan Toorop, who led the Dutch Luminist movement, an
offshoot of French Neo-Impressionism. The Luminists, like the
Neo-Impressionists, rendered light through a series of dots or
short lines of primary colours. Mondrian concentrated on this use
of colour and limited his palette to the primary hues: he proved his
mastery of this evocation of strong, radiant sunshine in paintings
such as Windmill in Sunlight (1908), executed mainly in yellow,
red, and blue. But he moved beyond the tenets of the movement
and expressed visual concerns that would remain constant in
his oeuvre. In a painting such as The Red Tree, also dated from
1908, he expressed his own vision of nature by creating a balance
between the contrasting hues of red and blue and between the
violent movement of the tree and the blue sky, thus producing a
sense of equilibrium, which would remain his prevailing aim in
representing nature. In 1909 Mondrian’s Luminist works were
exhibited in a large group show at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum,
which firmly established him as part of the Dutch avant-garde.

Mondrian, Piet: Facade of a House, Zeeland

Facade of a House, Zeeland, oil on canvas on cardboard by Piet Mondrian, date unknown; in a
private collection.

In a private collection

That year was important for Mondrian’s career from another point
of view: in May he joined the Theosophical Society, a group that
believed in a harmonious cosmos in which spirit and matter are
united. Inspired by these ideas, Mondrian began to free the objects
depicted in his paintings from naturalistic representation: these
objects became formal components of the overall harmony of his
paintings, or, in other words, the material elements began to
merge with the overall spiritual message of his work. He
concentrated on depicting large forms in nature, such as the
lighthouse in Westcapelle. In Evolution (1910–11), a triptych of
three standing human figures, the human figure and architectural
subjects look surprisingly similar, thus stressing Mondrian’s move
toward a painting grounded more in forms and visual rhythms
than in nature. In 1910 Mondrian’s Luminist works attracted
considerable attention at the St. Lucas Exhibition in Amsterdam.
The next year he submitted one of his more abstract paintings to
the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, his first bid for international
recognition.

Piet Mondrian
QUICK FACTS
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BORN

March 7, 1872
Amersfoort, Netherlands
DIED

February 1, 1944 (aged 71)

New York City, New York

MOVEMENT / STYLE

 Cubism
 abstract art
 De Stijl
 Abstraction-Création
 Neoplasticism
Cubist period in Paris

Concurrent with the spiritual influence of theosophy was

Mondrian’s exposure to new visual ideas. Dutch artists were
increasingly aware of the radical work of Paul Cézanne and of
the Cubist painters. The Dutch avant-garde began to call for new
standards in their national art that would incorporate such trends
and move beyond traditional landscape painting. Active in avant-
garde circles, Mondrian was very influenced by these ideas. In 1911
he saw for the first time the early Cubist works of Pablo
Picasso and Georges Braque. He was profoundly impressed, so
much so that early in 1912 he moved to Paris, where he settled in
the Montparnasse district.

Almost immediately he began to adapt the precepts of Cubism to

his own use, as evidenced in two versions of Still Life with
Gingerpot, done during the winter months of 1911–12. In the first
version, the objects are rendered as recognizable forms from
everyday life; in the second, he transformed the same objects into
compositional structures, taking his drive toward abstraction
further than he ever had before. Mondrian’s Cubist period lasted
from 1912 to 1917. His compositions of trees, architectural facades,
and scaffoldings during this period are proof of his urge to reduce
individual forms to a general formula. Mondrian kept somewhat
within the boundaries of Cubism by utilizing the Cubists’
limited colour palette of ochre, brown, and gray, so as not to
distract from form, and by painting large blocks of colour. He also
observed the Cubist scheme of composition, in which geometric
divisions are used and the painting gravitates toward a central
focus, leaving the corners of the canvas almost untouched; the
result of this scheme was his series of oval compositions. But in an
attempt to reduce the elements of his composition even further,
Mondrian avoided curved lines and diagonal accents and
increasingly used only vertical and horizontal lines. He went
beyond Analytical Cubism’s tendency to break individual objects
into their component parts by instead striving for a vision of
reality that surpassed depicting the individual object altogether:
from 1913 onward his style began its evolution toward total
abstraction.

In the summer of 1914 Mondrian returned to the Netherlands to

visit his father, who was seriously ill, and the outbreak of World
War I prevented him from returning to Paris. He settled at Laren,
where he became acquainted with M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, a
theosophical philosopher whose works on the symbolical meaning
of lines and on the mathematical construction of the universe had
a decisive influence on Mondrian’s vision of painting. In his work,
the artist had long been moving toward seeing the canvas as a site
of spiritual awakening for the viewer; this achieved theosophy’s
goal of bringing about a state of heightened consciousness during
the experience of everyday life. With the ideas of Schoenmaekers,
he now had a distinct set of graphic rules, closely related to his
own developing formal vocabulary, through which he could
achieve this goal of merging art and life. These discoveries pushed
his Cubist style to its extreme limits, particularly in his painting of
the church at Domburg and in a new theme, captured in a series of
works known as Pier and Ocean. The ultimate version of this
theme, completed in 1917 and shown at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-
Müller, marks the final stage of his Cubist style: an oval painting
composed of black vertical and horizontal line fragments on a
white background.

The birth of De Stijl

Continuing these radical developments, in 1917 Mondrian and
three other painters—Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck, and
Vilmos Huszar—founded the art periodical and the movement
of De Stijl. The group advocated 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
colours, and the neutrals of black, white, and gray. In the
movement’s journal, De Stijl, Mondrian essentially laid out all his
visual theories; because he contributed so extensively to the first
issues of the journal, the early style of De Stijl has become
synonymous with his own (in later years the movement was more
a reflection of the ideas of van Doesburg, the true leader of the
movement). The scope of this new style of line and colour, for
which Mondrian coined the name neoplasticism, was to free the
work of art from representing a momentary visual perception and
from being guided by the personal temperament of the artist. The
vision that Mondrian had moved toward for so long now seemed
to be within reach: he could now render “a true vision of reality” in
his painting, which meant deriving a composition not from a
fragment of reality but rather from an overall abstract view of the
harmony of the universe. A painting no longer had to begin from
an abstracted view of nature; rather, a painting could emerge out
of purely abstract rules of geometry and colour, since he found
that this was the most effective language through which to convey
his spiritual message.

Mondrian’s first neoplastic paintings were composed of rectangles

in soft hues of primary colours painted on a white background
with no use of line. His compositions were based on colour and
appear to expand over the borders of the canvas into space beyond
the picture. In 1918 he reintroduced lines into his painting, linking
the colour planes to one another and to the background by a series
of black vertical and horizontal strips, thus creating rectangles of
colour or noncolour. In 1918 and 1919 he executed a series of
rhomboid compositions, subdivided into a pattern of regular
squares differentiated by thick black lines and by soft hues of
ochre, gray, and rose. Also in 1919, he created two versions of a
checkerboard composition, one in dark and one in light colours, in
which the difference of the hues transforms this common pattern
into a rhythmic sequence of squares, which play off each other to
suggest vibrancy and movement. The titles of his works reflect this
move to pure abstraction: whereas his earlier work had
titles invoking the abstracted elements of nature or architecture
depicted, his work during this period generally had titles such
as Composition with Gray, Red, Yellow, and Black (c. 1920–26)
and Diagonal Composition (1921). He returned to Paris in 1919,
but he retained his close collaboration with De Stijl. By publishing
his theories in the booklet Le Néo-plasticisme in Paris in 1920,
Mondrian began to spread his ideas throughout Europe.

RELATED BIOGRAPHIES

 Joan Miró
 Jacques Villon
 Theo van Doesburg
 Robert Delaunay
  Bradley Walker Tomlin
 Pablo Picasso
 Vincent van Gogh
 Paul Cézanne
 Claude Monet
 Wassily Kandinsky
Later years

Some of Mondrian’s friends organized an exhibition of his works

at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on the occasion of his 50th
birthday. It was a retrospective progression of his paintings,
tracing the path from his beginnings in the Dutch traditional style
to his abstract paintings, firmly establishing the artist’s pivotal role
in the international art world’s move toward abstraction. He had
reached his goal, but he did not stand still: he continued to explore
the relationship between lines and blocks of colour, achieving an
ever-increasing purity in his paintings.

Although he did not exhibit frequently and rarely held a one-man

show, in the early 1930s he became affiliated with Cercle et
Carré and with Abstraction-Création, both of which were
influential international groups of artists who promoted and
exhibited abstract art. In 1934 he met the American artist Harry
Holtzman and the English painter Ben Nicholson. Nicholson
urged him to publish his essay “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art,”
Mondrian’s first essay in English, in the international
publication Circle, of which Nicholson was coeditor. In this way,
Mondrian’s ideas continued to gain an even broader audience.
When Mondrian decided to leave Paris in 1938, under the shadow
of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Adolf Hitler, he was
welcomed in London by members of the Circle group. For two
years he worked and lived in a London suburb, but the
bombardment of the city forced him to flee to New York City in
1940, where he was welcomed by Holtzman, the art
collector Peggy Guggenheim, art critic and museum director
James Johnson Sweeney, and other members of the American
artistic vanguard.
There, Mondrian’s style entered its last phase. Throughout the
1930s, Mondrian’s work had become increasingly severe. Inspired
by his regained freedom, New York City’s pulsating life, and the
new rhythms of American music, after 1940 he broke away first
from the austere patterns of black lines, replacing them with
coloured bands. Then, in place of the continuous flow of these
bands, he substituted a series of small rectangles that coalesced
into a rhythmic flow of colourful vertical and horizontal lines. His
late masterpieces—New York City I and Broadway Boogie
Woogie, exhibited in 1943–44, in his first personal exhibition in
more than two decades—express this new vivacity through
the autonomous, joyous movement of colour blocks. Buoyed by his
hope for a better future, Mondrian started his Victory Boogie
Woogie in 1942; it remained unfinished when he succumbed to
pneumonia in 1944.

Piet Mondrian: Composition in White, Black, and Red

Composition in White, Black, and Red, oil on canvas by Piet Mondrian, 1936; in the Museum of
Modern Art, New York City. 102.2 cm × 104.1 cm.

Peter Horree/Alamy

Legacy
The consistent development of Mondrian’s art toward complete
abstraction was an outstanding feat in the history of modern art,
and his work foreshadowed the rise of abstract art in the 1940s
and ’50s. But his art goes beyond merely aesthetic considerations:
his search for harmony through his painting has
an ethical significance. Rooted in a strict puritan tradition of
Dutch Calvinism and inspired by his theosophical beliefs, he
continually strove for purity during his long career, a purity best
explained by the double meaning of the Dutch word schoon, which
means both “clean” and “beautiful.” Mondrian chose the strict and
rigid language of straight line and pure colour to produce first of
all an extreme purity, and on another level, a Utopia of superb
clarity and force. When, in 1920, Mondrian dedicated Le Néo-
plasticisme to “future men,” his dedication implied that art can be
a guide to humanity, that it can move beyond depicting the casual,
arbitrary facts of everyday appearance and substitute in its place a
new, harmonious view of life.