Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian the Dutch painter (1872-1944), a founder of the De Stijl movement and one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His reduction of painting to black grid lines and rectangles of primary colour created an abstract language of balance and harmony that shaped architecture, design and graphic art across the modern world.

Early Life and Landscape Painting

Piet Mondrian was born in Amersfoort in the Netherlands in 1872, the son of a schoolmaster who was also a drawing teacher. He trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam and began his career as a painter of landscapes and rural subjects in the naturalistic manner of the Hague school, earning a living partly from portrait commissions and copies of museum pictures.

His early work, including views of the Dutch landscape, windmills, farms and trees, is modest and observant, sensitive to the grey light and flat horizons of his native country. Yet even in these years he was searching for something beyond description, and the influence of Symbolism and of the Theosophical movement turned his thought toward the spiritual meaning of art.

A visit to Paris in 1911 and 1912, where he encountered Cubism, transformed his approach. He moved to Paris and shortened his name to Mondrian, and under the impact of Braque and Picasso he began to break his subjects into planes, reducing natural forms to their essential structure. His series of trees show this progression from observed branch to abstract pattern.

Cubism, Theosophy and the Path to Abstraction

In Paris Mondrian pursued a rigorous analysis of form. His paintings of trees, scaffolding and facades became increasingly schematic, and by 1914 the subject was held in a shifting lattice of lines and greys. He returned to the Netherlands on a visit at the outbreak of the First World War and remained there, continuing his experiments in seclusion.

His thinking was deeply informed by Theosophy, whose doctrines of spiritual evolution and of a higher unity behind appearances gave him a philosophical framework. Under the influence of the mathematician and philosopher M. H. J. Schoenmaekers, he developed the idea that art should express the underlying harmony of the universe through the most fundamental means available to painting.

He reduced his vocabulary to straight lines at right angles, standing for the two opposing yet balancing forces of life, and to the three primary colours together with the non-colours of white, grey and black. In the first compositions of this kind, painted around 1917 to 1920, his mature style emerged.

De Stijl and Neoplasticism

In 1917 Mondrian joined with the painter and architect Theo van Doesburg and others to found De Stijl, a movement whose journal propagated a new art and design. He wrote a series of key essays setting out his theory, and he gave the name Neoplasticism to the style that he and his colleagues practised.

Neoplasticism held that painting must be purified of everything personal, subjective and naturalistic, and that it should become an art of relationships, of balance and proportion expressed through the primary elements of line and colour. The picture was to be a self-sufficient harmony whose equilibrium could serve as a model for a harmonious society.

His classic canvases of the 1920s, such as the compositions with large white fields divided by a few black lines and a small number of colour planes, are the purest expression of these principles. Their apparent simplicity conceals an exacting process, since the position and width of every line and the size of every rectangle were adjusted over long periods until the composition achieved the required balance.

Paris, London and New York

Mondrian lived in Paris through the 1920s and early 1930s in a famously austere studio, and his work was shown in the international exhibitions of the avant-garde. He broke with Van Doesburg in 1924 when the latter introduced the diagonal into his compositions, since Mondrian regarded the diagonal as a violation of the essential equilibrium of the horizontal and the vertical.

In 1938, threatened by the rise of fascism, he moved to London and then, as the war spread, to New York in 1940. The city transformed his art. The boogie-woogie music he loved, the grid of the streets and the energy of the metropolis entered his painting, and in the final works the black line was replaced by bands of colour that seem to flicker and interlock.

Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie, painted in New York, are the culmination of his career. In them the austere grid opens into a shimmering field of small coloured squares, and the static harmony of his earlier work is charged with movement and rhythm. He died in New York in 1944 before he could complete the last of them.

Influence and Legacy

Mondrian's influence has been extraordinary. His abstraction and his ideas about proportion and balance shaped the architecture and design of De Stijl, and through the Bauhaus and the broader modernist movement they informed typography, furniture, industrial design and town planning.

His paintings became the emblem of a whole conception of modern art, and their clarity and logic have made them endlessly reproduced and adapted. His example encouraged the view that abstract art could be rigorous rather than merely expressive, and it opened a path that later artists followed in Constructivism, Minimalism and geometric abstraction.

He is remembered as a painter of extreme discipline and conviction, one who devoted his life to the search for a universal harmony in the simplest means of his craft. Few artists have done more to define what abstract painting could be.

See also

• De Stijl
• Neoplasticism
• Abstract art
• Theo van Doesburg