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.

Netherlands 1914 - 1919

Unlike the cubists, Mondrian was still attempting to reconcile his painting with his spiritual pursuits, and in 1913, he began to fuse his art and his theosophical studies into a theory that signaled his final break from representational painting. 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 periodical in which he published his first essays defining his theory, for which he adopted the term neoplasticism.

Related Topics:
World War I - De Stijl - Neoplasticism

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Mondrian published ?De Nieuwe Beelding in de Schilderkunst? (?The New Plastic in Painting?) in twelve installments during 1917 and 1918. This was his first major attempt to express his artistic theory in writing. However, Mondrian?s best and most often-quoted expression of this theory comes from a letter he wrote to H. P. Bremmer in 1914:

Related Topics:
1917 - 1918 - 1914

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:"I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things?

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:I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true."

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