Piet Mondrian - Paris 1912–1914, Paris 1919–1938, London and New York 1938–1944, Trivia

Artist, born in Amersfoort, C Netherlands. One of the founders of the De Stijl movement, he began by painting landscapes in a traditional sombre Dutch manner, but after moving to Paris in 1909 he came under the influence of Matisse and Cubism. He then began painting still-lifes, becoming increasingly abstract. During World War 1 he concentrated on rectilinear compositions which depend for their beauty on the simple relationships between the coloured areas. His work has been a major influence on all purely abstract painters, and he is considered the leader of Neoplasticism.

New York City, February 1, 1944), Dutch painter

Mondrian was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. Despite being well-known, often-parodied and even trivialized, Mondrian's paintings exhibit a complexity that belies their apparent simplicity. He is best known for his non-representational paintings that he called compositions, consisting of rectangular forms of red, yellow, blue or black, separated by thick, black rectilinear lines. These paintings are most definitely representational, and illustrate the influence that various artistic movements had on Mondrian, including pointillism and the vivid colors of fauvism. Although it is in no sense abstract, "Avond" is the earliest of Mondrian's works to emphasize the primary colors. However, although the end result leads the viewer to begin emphasizing the forms over the content, these paintings are still firmly rooted in nature, and it is only the knowledge of Mondrian's later achievements that leads one to search for the roots of his future abstraction in these works. 1872-1944 Mondrian's art was always intimately related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. Blavatsky believed that it was possible to attain a knowledge of nature more profound than that provided by empirical means, and much of Mondrian's work for the rest of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge.

Mondrian and his later work were deeply influenced by the 1911 Moderne Kunstkring exhibition of Cubism in Amsterdam.

Paris 1912–1914

1912, Mondrian moved to Paris and changed his name (dropping an 'a' from Mondriaan) to emphasize his departure from life in the artistic backwater of Holland. From this point on, he signed his work as "Mondrian". While in Paris, the influence of the Cubism of Picasso and Braque appeared almost immediately in Mondrian's work. However, while Mondrian was eager to absorb the Cubist influence into his work, it seems clear that he saw Cubism as a road leading to an end, rather than an end in itself.

World War I began while Mondrian was visiting home in 1914, and he was forced to remain in the Netherlands for the duration of the conflict. During this period, Mondrian stayed at the Laren artist's colony, there meeting Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg, both artists undergoing their own personal journeys toward abstraction at the time. Van der Leck's use of only primary colors in his art greatly influenced Mondrian. With Van Doesburg, Mondrian founded "De Stijl" ("The Style"), a journal of De Stijl group in which he published his first essays defining his theory, for which he adopted the term neoplasticism.

Mondrian published “De Nieuwe Beelding in de Schilderkunst” (“The New Plastic in Painting”) in twelve installments during 1917 and 1918. Bremmer in 1914:

Paris 1919–1938

When the war ended in 1919, Mondrian returned to France, where he would remain until 1938. Mondrian began producing grid-based paintings in late 1919, and in 1920, the style for which he came to be renowned began to appear.

In the early paintings of this style, such as "Composition A" (1920) and "Composition B" (1920), the lines delineating the rectangular forms are relatively thin, and they are gray, not black. The forms themselves, smaller and more numerous than in later paintings, are filled with primary colors, black, or gray, and nearly all of them are colored;

Beginning late 1920 and 1921, Mondrian's paintings arrive at what are their definitive and mature form to casual observers. Although the refinements became more subtle, Mondrian's work continued to evolve during his years in Paris.

In the 1921 paintings, many of the black lines (but not all of them) stop short at a seemingly arbitrary distance from the edge of the canvas, although the divisions between the rectangular forms remain intact. As the years passed and Mondrian's work evolved further, he began extending all of the lines to the edges of the canvas, and he also began to use fewer and fewer colored forms, favoring white instead.

These tendencies are particularly obvious in the “lozenge” works that Mondrian began producing with regularity in the mid-1920s. One of the most minimal of Mondrian's canvases, this painting consists only of two black, perpendicular lines and a small triangular form, colored blue. The lines extend all the way to the edges of the canvas, almost giving the impression that the painting is a fragment of a larger work. Mondrian's paintings are not composed of perfectly flat planes of color, as one might expect. This generates a greater sense of depth in the white forms, as though they are overwhelming the lines and the colors, which indeed they were, as Mondrian's paintings of this period came to be increasingly dominated by white space. In the 1930s, he began to use thinner lines and double lines more frequently, punctuated with a few small colored forms, if any at all. Double lines particularly excited Mondrian, for he believed they offered his paintings a new dynamism which he was eager to explore.

London and New York 1938–1944

September 1938, Mondrian left Paris in the face of advancing fascism and moved to London. Some of Mondrian's later works are difficult to place in terms of his artistic development, because there were quite a few canvases that he began in Paris or London, which he only completed months or years later in New York. However, the finished works from this later period demonstrate an unprecedented busyness, with more lines than any of his work since the 1920s, placed in an overlapping manner that is almost cartographical in appearance.

Mondrian produced "Lozenge Composition With Four Yellow Lines" (1933), a simple painting that introduced what for him was a shocking innovation: thick, colored lines instead of black ones. After that one painting, this practice remained dormant in Mondrian's work until he arrived in New York, at which time he began to embrace it with abandon. In some examples of this new direction, such as "Composition" (1938) / "Place de la Concorde" (1943), he appears to have taken unfinished black-line paintings from Paris and completed them in New York by adding short perpendicular lines of different colors, running between the longer black lines, or from a black line to the edge of the canvas. The newly-colored areas are thick, almost bridging the gap between lines and forms, and it is startling to see color in a Mondrian painting that is unbounded by black. Other works mix long lines of red amidst the familiar black lines, creating a new sense of depth by the addition of a colored layer on top of the black one.

The new canvases that Mondrian began in New York are even more startling, and indicate the beginning of a new idiom that was unfortunately cut short by the artist's death. In this painting and the unfinished "Victory Boogie Woogie" (1942-44), Mondrian replaced former solid lines with lines created from small adjoining rectangles of color, created in part by using small pieces of paper tape in various colors. While Mondrian's works of the 1920s and 1930s tend to have an almost scientific austerity about them, these are bright, lively paintings, reflecting the upbeat music that inspired them and the city in which they were made.

Mondrian wrote, on a postcard to art historian James Johnson Sweeney, planner of a retrospective exhibition of the artist's works at The Museum of Modern Art in New York: "Only now [in 1943], I become conscious that my work in black, white, and little color planes has been merely 'drawing' in oil color. In these final works, the forms have indeed usurped the role of the lines, opening another new door for Mondrian's development as an abstractionist. The "Boogie-Woogie" paintings were clearly more of a revolutionary change than an evolutionary one, representing the most profound development in Mondrian's work since his abandonment of representational art in 1913.

The apparent simplicity of Mondrian's best-known works is deceptive. Although he was a fine artist, rather than a commercial artist, Mondrian is considered the father of advertising design, due to the widespread and continued adoption of his grid style as a basic structure of graphic-design layout.

Piet Mondrian died of pneumonia and was interred in the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Trivia

Molly Ringwald's character (Andie) in "Pretty in Pink" prominently displays three Mondrian paintings in her room.