Mondrian, Piet

orig. Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan

born March 7, 1872, Amersfoort, Neth.

died Feb. 1, 1944, New York, N.Y., U.S.

Dutch painter.

At the insistence of his father, headmaster of a Calvinist school, he obtained an education degree, but then immediately began taking painting lessons. His first paintings were exhibited in 1893; his early work reflected the influence of avant-garde trends such as Post-Impressionism and Cubism. In 1917 Mondrian and three other painters founded the art periodical and the movement known as De Stijl. The group advocated a style called "neoplasticism," which entailed 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. He painted in this style for the next 20 years, until he fled war-torn Paris for London and then New York City in 1940. Inspired by the city's pulsating life and the new rhythms of musical forms such as jazz, he replaced his austere patterns with a series of small squares and rectangles that coalesced into a flow of colourful vertical and horizontal lines. His late masterpieces (e.g., Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1942–43) express this new vivacity. 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.

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▪ Dutch painter

Introduction

original name  Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan 

born March 7, 1872, Amersfoort, The 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 (Stijl, De) (“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.

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 (Kuyper, Abraham), 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.

Influence of Post-Impressionists and Luminists

      In 1907 Amsterdam sponsored the Quadrennial Exhibition, featuring such painters as Kees van Dongen (Dongen, Kees van), Otto van Rees, and Jan Sluijters, who were Post-Impressionists (Post-Impressionism) 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 (Gogh, Vincent van), 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 (Munch, Edvard) and a colour scheme—based on hues of yellow, orange, blue, violet, and red—that was suggestive of the palette of contemporary German Expressionist (Expressionism) 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.

      That year was important for Mondrian's career from another point of view: in May he joined the Theosophical Society (theosophy), 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.

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 (Cézanne, Paul) and of the Cubist (Cubism) 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 (Picasso, Pablo) and Georges Braque (Braque, Georges). 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 (Doesburg, Theo van), 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.

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, Ben). 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 (Guggenheim, Peggy), 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.

Assessment

      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.

Hans L.C. Jaffé Ed.

Additional Reading

Life and work

The first comprehensive source on Mondrian was Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian: Life and Work (1956), a descriptive catalog of all Mondrian's paintings with an extensive bibliography. Another extensive catalog was Maria Grazia Ottolenghi, L'opera completa di Mondrian (1974); while a more recent one is Robert P. Welsh and Joop M. Joosten, Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné, 3 vol. in 2 (1998). Further monographs on Mondrian include Frank Elgar, Mondrian, trans. from French (1968); L.J.F. Wijsenbeek, Piet Mondrian, trans. from Dutch (1968), written by a former director of Haags Gemeentemuseum, which houses the largest collection of Mondrian's work; Hans L.C. Jaffé, Piet Mondrian (1970); and John Milner, Mondrian (1992, reissued 1994).

Themes and criticism

Specific aspects of Mondrian's oeuvre and artistic goals are examined in Nancy J. Troy, Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism in America (1979); Kermit Swiler Champa, Mondrian Studies (1985); David Shapiro and Christopher Sweet, Mondrian Flowers: Essay (1991); Meyer Schapiro, Mondrian: On the Humanity of Abstract Painting (1995); and Serge Fauchereau, Mondrian and the Neo-Plasticist Utopia (1994).

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