Piet Mondrian

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Born: 1872

Died: 1944

Summary of Piet Mondrian

The pureness of his abstractions and the systematic technique by which Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the contemporary Dutch movement De Stijl, is known. He drastically reduced the components of his paintings to represent the spiritual order underlying the visible world and to create inside his canvases a clear, universal aesthetic language. In his most famous 1920s paintings, Mondrian simplified his forms to lines and rectangles and his palette to basic elements that drive beyond allusions to the outer world into pure abstraction. His use of the asymmetrical balance and his reduced visual language were essential for the creation of modern art and his famous abstract work continues to have influence on design and popular culture.

Mondrian, a thinker and writer, felt art reflects nature’s inherent spirituality. In order to expose the core of the mystical energy in the balance of forces which controlled nature and the cosmos, he reduced the themes of his paintings down to the fundamental components.

Mondrian decided to condense the fundamental vertical and horizontal components of his universe representing the two main opponents: the positive and negative, the dynamic and the static, the masculine and the feminine. His compositions’ dynamic balance reflects what he considered the global equilibrium of these forces.

In the systematic development of his creative technique from conventional depiction to full abstraction Mondrian’s unique vision of the contemporary art is clearly shown. His works develop in a logical way and show clearly the influence of several contemporary art styles like luminism, impressionism and most all Cubism.

In order to convey a utopian vision of universal harmony in all the arts Mondrian and the De Stijl painters supported pure abstraction and a palette of walls. Mondrian thought that his vision of contemporary art would transcend differences in culture, by means of fundamental shapes and colours, and that it would create a new universal language based upon pure primary colours, flatness of forms and dynamic tension.

The evolution of Neo-Plasticism by Mondrian became one of the major abstract art texts. In the movement, he defined his view of creative expression by referring to “plasticism” as an approach to portraying contemporary reality, the motion of the shapes and colours on the surface of the canvas.

Childhood

Piet Mondrian, born Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Jr. grew up in a devotionally Calvinist household in central Holland as the second of five children. In his family, art and music were fostered. His father, the local primary school principal, was a passionate artist who taught his son sketching, while his uncle, Fritz Mondriaan, was an excellent artist and taught him to paint his nephew.

Early Life

In 1892, she enlisted in the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten or in Amsterdam in the Royal Academy of Visual Arts. His three years of academic education concentrated on model drawing, copy of Old Masters and genre painting. In the years to come he would depend on this ability to sustain himself by creating scientific drawings and reproductions of museum artworks as well as lecturing in his workshop.

“Always further,” is how Mondrian called his passion for the transformation of his artwork. His conventional compositions of landscape started to show a new sense of drama and light from 1905 onwards. Jan Toorop, the prominent Dutch lighting artist, introduced the French Post-Impressionists to Mondrian. Mondrian’s paintings evolved significantly, including, for example, Vincent van Gogh’s strong colour and brushwork and Georges Seurat’s pointillist method. Even in these early pieces, it is clear that Mondrian tended to paint in series and concentrated on a particular topic. Both aspects would be essential to the development of its abstract and mature style.

Art and philosophy were intimately interwoven for Mondrian. He was a creative writer and thinker who studied spiritual and philosophy. In 1909 in the early decades of the 20th century he joined the Theosophical Society, a spiritual organisation, founded on Buddhism’s teachings. Theosophy had a direct effect on his manner of depiction, shown in floral paintings and more particularly, the Evolution piece (1910-1911), which echoes the Buddhist and theosophic cycles of death and renaissance. Mondrian emphasises in his artwork the importance of spirituality, “I’m drawn to the spiritual all the time. I became aware, via Theosophy, that art might transcend to finer areas I call the spiritual world.” Although he subsequently disagreed with some of the group members, Theosophy inspired Mondrian’s aim of portraying full, pure harmony, portrayed in his paintings by balancing and straining form and colour.

Mid Life

Cubism’s impact represents a turning point in the career of Mondrian. He went to Paris in 1912 and got completely acquainted with the works of Picasso, Braque and others, transitioning from a neo-imperressionist representation to a contemporary abstraction. Analytic Cubism provided Mondrian the required structure to distille his landscapes to their finest components of form and line: he used the Cubist grid, which reduced his pictures of trees and buildings to a schemed framework. In his early years in Paris, Mondrian used the Cubist muted grey and yellow/brown range briefly, as in The Gray Tree (1912). Unlike the Cubists, however, Mondrian wanted to emphasise the flattness of the painting surface rather than to mention, as the Cubists showed, the three dimensional illusionary depth.

In 1914, when World War I broke out, Mondrian visited his ill dad in Holland. Until 1919, he could not return to Paris. Although isolated from the avant-garde in Paris, Mondrian kept developing his style for pure abstraction. Curved lines and any allusions to things or nature eventually vanished from his works. Mondrian, artist and architect Theo van Doesburg established the newspaper De Stijl in 1917 during this crucial time. De Stijl or “the style,” was a movement among Dutch painters, designers and architects that offered an ideal of complete abstraction as a role model for harmony and order across the arts. Independent of that found in Paris, Mondrian and these painters created a concept of modernity.

Mondrian called neo-plasticism or new plastic art the resultant creative style. “plastic” for Mondrian only refers to a new representation of reality that is found on the surface of the painting itself. The painters from De Stijl focused on the «absolute devaluation of tradition» and restricted the components in their pictures to direct, horizontal and vertical lines, the correct angles, the three principal colours (red, yellow, blue) and the three achromatic colours (grey, white, and black). During the 20th century, the De Stijl movement had a significant worldwide impact on architecture, art, typography and interior design.

Late Life

After World War I Mondrian returned to Paris and started producing the famous abstract paintings he is most known for at the age of 47. In the mid-1920s, Paris developed a distinct abstractive style comparable to modern Surrealism and Paris Dada movements. Mondrian’s 1920s paintings are the finest embodiment of his Neoplastic expression ideal of pureness and universal harmony. Mondrian was first recognised in 1925, when his paintings entered the collections of rich Europeans and Americans, as a contribution to modernism.

Before the beginning of the Second World War, Mondrian went to London two years before settling in 1940 in New York City. Whilst in 1938 in London, Mondrian met and made friends with Peggy Guggenheim, a friendship that gave Guggenheim a strong support of the Netherlands exile first in London and subsequently in New York. Mondrian was introduced to the blossoming avant-garde New York art scene and collaborated with American abstract artists – further legitimising the position of the new group in contemporary art by mentoring European abstraction.

At the time, he broadened his visual language – adding double lines then coloured lines and eventually replacing his black grid with pulsing coloured square lines. Inspired by his new environment in the Americas, he shows a fresh vitality and compositional complexity in Broadway Boogie-late Woogie’s works (1943). Mondrian’s life, dedicated to his work, mirrored the purity and discipline of his painting. He stayed single and simply lived with little property. He died of pneumonia at the age of 71 in 1944.

The refined abstractions of Mondrian and the utopian aspirations underlying his work had a tremendous effect both as a man and as a result of his death on the evolution of contemporary art. The Bauhaus instantly referred to his work, in particular in the simple lines and colours of the school’s aesthetics and its ideal where the arts could bring all areas of life into harmony. The style of Mondrian is later to be observed in the innovations of the minimalists of the late 1960s, who likewise chose small shapes and a pallet wall. The far-reaching impact of Mondrian’s influence not only is visible in modern and postmodern culture across all aspects: from Yves Saint Laurent’s color-blocking at his “Mondrian” day-dress to the use of Mondrian’s Neoplastic style and palette by the white stripes rock band to cover their 2000 album De Stijl and his name as monic for three hotels, “Mondrian”

Famous Art by Piet Mondrian

Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray, and Blue

1921

In the 1920s, Mondrian started creating the most famous definitive abstract paintings. His palette was restricted to white, black, grey and three basic colours, with a structure made of strong, dark horizontal and vertical lines that defined the boundaries of the different colour or reserve rectangles. For Mondrian’s development of a new abstract art, different from Cubism and Futurism, it was necessary to simplify the painting components. The many colour blocks and width lines produce rhythms which stream over the canvas surface, reflecting the diverse rhythms of contemporary life. As in all its mature works, the composition is asymmetrical, with a big coloured dominating block here red, balanced by the distribution of the smaller blocks of yellow, blue, and white. Many artists and designers in many areas of culture have referenced this style since the 1920s.

Tableau I: Lozenge with Four Lines and Gray

1926

After the development of its mature Neoplastic style, Mondrian tried, in his abstractions, to convey a more dynamic rhythm. He started creating “lozenge” pictures (as early as 1919) to make the image plane more vivid. The “lozenge” paintings are called as such because of the diamond form that Mondrian has used for his square canvasses an unusual orientation, turning them at a 45 degree angle with an angle in the head. His invention presented his horizontal and vertical lines on the diagonal lines of the canvas edge. The lines seem to stretch beyond the borders of the canvas in this specific composition as the diagonals meet at varying intervals. This specific example depends on four lines of various thicknesses that bisect the grey picture plane to represent Mondrian’s ideal of dynamic equilibrium. By changing the orientation of the canvas, Mondrian was an essential precedent for the Minimalists’ shaped canvases in the 1960s. With this painting completely without colour, Mondrian also prefigured the interest of Minimalists in pure form and in favour of grey, white and other silent hues.

Broadway Boogie-Woogie

1942-1943

This painting shows the spectator with the conclusion of the lifetime of Mondrian in transferring the order that the natural world underlying via completely abstract shapes on a flat surface. The black grid has been replaced by colours with solid coloured blocks through the usage of its fundamental visual language of lines, squares and primary colours. This of his late abstract paintings illustrate a fresh and renewed energy directly influenced by New York City’s vibrancy and the jazz pace. The uneven spread of the brilliantly coloured squares inside the yellow lines reflects a diverse speed of life in the busy city, nearly as people rush along the sidewalk from stoplight to stop light. Broadway Boogie-Woogie not only refers to city life, but also announces the development of New York as the new hub of contemporary art following the second world war. The final full painting by Mondrian shows his continuous artistic innovation while staying faithful to his ideas and formats.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

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• The pureness of his abstractions and the systematic technique by which Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the contemporary Dutch movement De Stijl, is known.
• He drastically reduced the components of his paintings to represent the spiritual order underlying the visible world and to create inside his canvases a clear, universal aesthetic language.
• In his most famous 1920s paintings, Mondrian simplified his forms to lines and rectangles and his palette to basic elements that drive beyond allusions to the outer world into pure abstraction.
• His use of the asymmetrical balance and his reduced visual language were essential for the creation of modern art and his famous abstract work continues to have influence on design and popular culture.Mondrian, a thinker and writer, felt art reflects nature’s inherent spirituality.
• In order to expose the core of the mystical energy in the balance of forces which controlled nature and the cosmos, he reduced the themes of his paintings down to the fundamental components.Mondrian decided to condense the fundamental vertical and horizontal components of his universe representing the two main opponents: the positive and negative, the dynamic and the static, the masculine and the feminine.
• His compositions’ dynamic balance reflects what he considered the global equilibrium of these forces.In the systematic development of his creative technique from conventional depiction to full abstraction Mondrian’s unique vision of the contemporary art is clearly shown.
• His works develop in a logical way and show clearly the influence of several contemporary art styles like luminism, impressionism and most all Cubism.In order to convey a utopian vision of universal harmony in all the arts Mondrian and the De Stijl painters supported pure abstraction and a palette of walls.
• Mondrian thought that his vision of contemporary art would transcend differences in culture, by means of fundamental shapes and colours, and that it would create a new universal language based upon pure primary colours, flatness of forms and dynamic tension.The evolution of Neo-Plasticism by Mondrian became one of the major abstract art texts.
• In the movement, he defined his view of creative expression by referring to “plasticism” as an approach to portraying contemporary reality, the motion of the shapes and colours on the surface of the canvas.

Information Citations

En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.

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