Mondrian, Piet

Mondrian, Piet (originally Pieter Mondriaan) (1872–1944). Dutch painter, one of the most important figures in the development of abstract art. He was born in Amersfoort, near Utrecht; his father (a strict Calvinist schoolteacher, described by a friend of Mondrian as ‘sententious, forbidding, and frankly disagreeable') was an amateur artist and his uncle was a professional painter. Between 1892 and 1897 he studied intermittently at the Amsterdam Academy and his initial progress was slow (he was unsure of his vocation and for a time considered becoming a minister of religion). His early paintings were naturalistic and direct, often delicate in colour, though greys and dark greens predominated (Mill by the Water, MOMA, New York, c. 1905). Between 1907 and 1910 his work took on a Symbolist character, partly under the influence of Jan Toorop and perhaps partly because of his conversion to Theosophy (he joined the Dutch Theosophical Society in 1909), and he also experimented with a kind of loose Neo-Impressionist technique, using large blobs (rather than small dots) of pure colour (Church at Zoutelande, Tate Gallery, London, 1910). At the beginning of 1912 he moved to Paris, where he initially lived in the studio of his countryman Conrad Kikkert (see MODERNE KUNSTKRING). He divided his time between Paris and the Netherlands until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 made it impossible to continue working in France. In this period he was strongly influenced by Cubism, painting a series of pictures on the theme of a tree in which the image became progressively more fragmented and abstract (Flowering Apple Tree, Gemeente Museum, The Hague, 1912). By 1914 he had virtually eliminated curved lines from his work, using a structure that was predominantly horizontal and vertical, with the merest suggestion of natural forms underlying the patterning.

During the First World War Mondrian worked mainly at Laren, near Amsterdam. This was a place much favoured by intellectuals and provided a sympathetic climate in which to develop his ideas about abstract art. In 1915 he met Theo van Doesburg, and two years later he joined him in founding the association De Stijl; it promoted a new kind of rigorously geometrical abstract painting of which Mondrian became the main exponent. In this style, which he named Neo-Plasticism, he limited himself to straight lines and basic colours to create an art of great clarity and discipline that he thought reflected the laws of the universe, revealing immutable realities behind the ever-changing appearances of the world. Typically he used a bold grid of black lines (all completely straight and either strictly horizontal or strictly vertical) to form an asymmetrical network of rectangles of various sizes that were painted with a narrow range of colours (the three primaries—blue, red, and yellow—plus black, white, and initially grey, although this was later dropped). At first his work was very similar to van Doesburg's, but by about 1920 the two men had begun to develop separately (see ELEMENTARISM). Mondrian gradually refined his methods until by about 1925 he used his simple repertoire to achieve a sense of taut balance and poise that none of his imitators could match. A good example is Composition in Yellow and Blue (Boymans Museum, Rotterdam, 1929), of which George Heard Hamilton writes: ‘Five lines of slightly varying thickness intersect to create six rectangles, all of different sizes, four white, one yellow, and one blue. The means could scarcely be “purer”, nor the result more “complete”. There is no conventional balance or symmetry, but the elements of line, shape, and colour are disposed on the flat surface so that each is held in subtle but inescapable relation to every other … His compositions … have no centre, no focus, and their tensions are so distributed across the entire surface that each square inch is essential to the whole.’

From 1919 to 1938 Mondrian lived in Paris, where in 1931 he joined the Abstraction-Création group. For many years he had struggled to earn a living (sometimes producing watercolours of flowers to make ends meet), but in the 1920s he gradually became known to an international circle of admirers, his patrons including the American Katherine Dreier (from 1926). A retrospective exhibition of his work was organized at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1922 to mark his 50th birthday, an indication of the esteem he enjoyed among the avant-garde in his own country. In 1938 he left Paris because of the threat of war and for the next two years lived in London, near Naum Gabo and Ben Nicholson (who had encouraged him to move). After the house next door to his studio was hit by a bomb, he moved to New York in 1940 and spent his remaining years there, adapting well to his new home even though he was now almost 70. In America he developed a more colourful style (he dispensed with the black grid), with syncopated rhythms that reflect his interest in jazz and dancing (Broadway Boogie-Woogie, MOMA, New York, 1942–3); he was noted for his immaculate tidiness and rather ascetic, priestly air ( Ben Nicholson compared his studio to a hermit's cave), but he had a passion for social dancing and took lessons in fashionable steps. John Milner (Mondrian, 1992) writes: ‘Even in middle age, when he was already enjoying some celebrity, his studio was stark and denuded of all but the most necessary comforts. His only indulgence was a gramophone. Some of his furniture was constructed from wooden boxes … He had no wife, no children, to enrich and complicate the simplicity of his daily life, to impose upon him or to upset the stillness of the studio where he lived and found the real measure of his world … He rarely smiled for photographs, appearing reserved, austere, preoccupied and a little awkward in company … [but] he was welcoming and helpful to visitors.’

Mondrian's enormous influence was not limited to artists whose styles and aesthetic outlooks were similar to his own. He also had a powerful impact on much industrial, decorative, and advertisement art from the 1930s onwards; indeed Ian Dunlop writes that ‘it is no exaggeration to say that his effect on the look and style of contemporary life has been greater than that of any modern artist, even of such supreme masters as Matisse and Picasso’ (Piet Mondrian, 1967). His influence was spread by his writings as well as his paintings. Apart from numerous articles in the periodical De Stijl, he wrote the book Néo-plasticisme (Paris, 1920), which was published by the Bauhaus in German translation as Neue Gestaltung (1924), and the essay ‘Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art', published in Circle (1937). Piet Mondrian: Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, 1937, and Other Essays, 1941–43, was published in New York in 1945; The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian in London in 1987.