Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian (March 7, 1872 – February 1, 1944) was a Dutch painter and an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. Despite being well-known, often-parodied, and even trivialized, Mondrian's paintings exhibit a complexity that belie their apparent simplicity. He is best known for his non-representational paintings (which he called compositions), consisting of rectangular forms of red, yellow, blue, or black, separated by thick, black, rectilinear lines. They are the result of a stylistic evolution that occurred over the course of nearly thirty years, and which continued beyond that point to the end of his life.

London & New York 1938 - 1944

In September 1938, Mondrian left Paris in the face of advancing fascism and moved to London. After the Netherlands were invaded and Paris fell in 1940, he left London for New York City, where he would remain until his death. 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.

Related Topics:
Fascism - London - New York City

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In 1933, Mondrian had produced "Lozenge Composition With Four Yellow Lines," 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.

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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. "New York City" (1942) is a complex lattice of red, blue, and yellow lines, occasionally interlacing to create a greater sense of depth than ever before. An unfinished 1941 version of this work uses strips of painted paper tape, which the artist could rearrange at will to experiment with different designs.

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His painting "Broadway Boogie-Woogie" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is highly influential in the school of abstract geometric painting. The piece is made up of a number of shimmering squares of bright color that leap from the canvas, then appear to shimmer, drawing you into those neon lights.

Related Topics:
Broadway Boogie-Woogie - Museum of Modern Art - Abstract geometric

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Mondrian?s final works, "Broadway Boogie Woogie" (1942-43) and the unfinished "Victory Boogie Woogie" (1942-44), replace the solid lines with lines created from tiny adjoining rectangles of color, created in part using small pieces of paper tape in various colors. Larger unbounded rectangles of color punctuate the design, some with smaller concentric rectangles inside them. 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.

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Mondrian wrote, in a postcard to James Johnson Sweeney, planner of a retrospective exhibition of the artist?s works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that ?only now , I become conscious that my work in black, white, and little color planes has been merely ?drawing? in oil color. In drawing, the lines are the principal means of expression; in painting, the color planes. In painting, however, the lines are absorbed by the color planes; but the limitation of the planes show themselves as lines and conserve their great value.? 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. Unfortunately, we were to have only a glimpse of this new innovation. Piet Mondrian died in New York City in 1944, of pneumonia at the age of 71, and was interred in the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Related Topics:
1944 - Pneumonia - Cypress Hills Cemetery - Brooklyn, New York

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The apparent simplicity of Mondrian's most well-known works have led some people to believe that anyone, even a child, could paint them. However, careful study of Mondrian's neoplastic compositions makes it clear that they are utterly original works that are extremely difficult to reproduce with the same effect that he generated. Moreover, such works are the culmination of a decades-long conceptual journey through modern art that involved experimentation with many different styles and movements. Mondrian's oft-emulated reductionist style continues to inspire the art, fashion, advertising, and design worlds. Although he was a fine artist (not a commercial artist), Mondrian is considered the father of advertising design, because of the widespread and continued adoption of his grid style as a basic structure of graphic design layout.

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