Modern Age
Piet Mondrian (1872–1944)
Dutch Early Abstraction painter.
Piet Mondrian spent thirty years reducing the visible world to a set of universal laws, and in doing so gave the twentieth century one of its most recognisable images: the white field ruled by black lines and blocks of red, blue, and yellow. He began as a conventional Dutch landscape painter — windmills, dunes, and trees along the river Gein — but a growing spiritual conviction, deepened by his membership of the Dutch Theosophical Society from 1909, pushed him to seek the 'universal' hidden behind natural appearances.
Cubism, which he encountered in Paris around 1912, showed him how to break the object into planes; but where the Cubists stopped short of pure abstraction, Mondrian kept going. Trapped in the Netherlands during the First World War, he worked through series of trees, church façades, and piers until only crossing verticals and horizontals remained. In 1917 he and Theo van Doesburg founded the journal De Stijl, and in its pages Mondrian named his art Neo-Plasticism: the pursuit of dynamic equilibrium through nothing but the right angle and the primary colours.
He held to that discipline with near-religious strictness — famously breaking with van Doesburg when the latter introduced the diagonal — and shaped his own Paris studio into a three-dimensional Neo-Plastic composition. Fleeing the war again, he reached New York in 1940, where the city's grid and jazz set his rigour dancing: 'Broadway Boogie Woogie', made just before his death in 1944, replaces the black lines with pulsing bands of coloured squares. His equilibrium of verticals, horizontals, and primaries became one of the foundations of modern art, architecture, and design.
The words the record keeps using: austere, harmonious, rigorous, meditative, universal, balanced.
At a glance
- Lived 1872–1944
- Origin Dutch
- Worked in Amsterdam, Paris, New York
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Early Abstraction, De Stijl
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Geometric abstraction
Works in the archive
- Gray Tree, 1911 (Kunstmuseum Den Haag (Gemeentemuseum), The Hague)
A key step on Mondrian's road to abstraction. A single tree is rendered in Cubist-influenced grey and blue planes, its branches spreading into a web of curving and straightening lines that begin to lock into a shallow… - Evolution, 1911 (Kunstmuseum Den Haag (Gemeentemuseum), The Hague)
Mondrian's most openly Theosophical work: a three-panel painting of a standing female figure whose eyes and body change across the panels to symbolise the soul's ascent from material to spiritual awareness. Geometric… - Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930 (Kunsthaus Zürich)
The classic statement of Neo-Plasticism: a large red block dominates the upper right, balanced by a small blue and a small yellow, all held in a grid of black lines against white. Small in size but monumental in effect,… - Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Made in New York near the end of Mondrian's life, this is his rigorous grid set dancing. The solid black lines are gone; in their place, bands built from small blocks of yellow, red, blue, and grey flicker like the…
What was said
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty; he is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is cosmic, universal. This conscious recognition has for its corollary an abstract plasticism, for man adheres only to what is universal.
Mondrian wrote that it took him a long time to discover that the particularities of natural form and colour evoke subjective states of feeling that obscure pure reality; to reach it, he held, natural forms must be reduced to constant elements of form and natural colour to primary colour, in the interest of a larger unity.
Mondrian joined the Dutch Theosophical Society in 1909, and his search for a universal harmony behind natural appearances — expressed first in symbolic works like 'Evolution' and later in Neo-Plasticism — was rooted in Theosophical ideas of an underlying spiritual order.
Lineage
Learned from Barnett Newman, Juan Gris, Theo van Doesburg, Joaquín Torres-García
What would Piet make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Piet Mondrian", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Piet · Keep a life moment the way Piet would · Pictures made after Piet