Piet Mondrian (1872 1944)

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter and one of the

founders of modern Dutch movement De Stijl. He
radically simplified the elements of his paintings to
reflect what he saw as the spiritual order underlying
the visible world, creating a clear, universal aesthetic
language within his canvases. In his best known
paintings from the 1920s, compositions were largely
restricted to the three primary colors red, yellow and
blue plus black and white. Though he sometimes
deviated from primary colors, horizontal and vertical
lines, right angles, and geometric shapes were the
hallmarks of his style.His use of asymmetrical balance
and a simplified pictorial vocabulary were crucial in the
development of modern art, and his iconic abstract
works remain influential in design and familiar in
popular culture to this day.

File-Photo : Piet Mondrian

The Beginning
Pieter Cornelis Mondrian was born on 7 march 1872 in Amersfoort, Holland. His father was a
skilful draughtsman. His uncle Frits Mondrian was a painter. He painted landscapes under his
uncles guidance in post- impressionistic style. From a very early age, Piet showed his gifts
for drawing and painting, and qualified as a secondary school drawing teacher. He attended
drawing classes at an academy in Amsterdam,Holland.
The year 1908 marked the first major turning point of Mondrian's
painting style exposure to Theosophy. Under the influence of the painter Jan Toorop, he
began to experiment with more brilliant colors.

Mature Period
In 1911, he moved to Paris and started to experiment with Cubist style.The influence of the
cubist style of Picasso and Georges Braque appeared almost immediately in his works like
The Sea(1912) and his The Grey Tree(1912).
In 1914, He was visiting his sick father in Holland when World War I broke out. He was
unable to return to Paris until 1919. Despite being separated from the avant-garde in Paris,
Mondrian continued to develop his style toward pure abstraction. Curved lines gradually
disappeared from his paintings along with all references to objects or nature. During this key
period, Mondrian along with several artists and architect Theo van Doesburg founded the
journal De Stijl in 1917. De Stijl was a movement among Dutch artists, architects, and
designers that presented an ideal of total abstraction as a model for harmony and order
across the arts. Mondrian and these artists developed a vision of modernism independently
from that found in Paris. Mondrian termed the resulting artistic style Neo-Plasticism, or the
new plastic art. The De Stijl movement proved to have a major international influence on
architecture, art, typography, and interior design throughout the 20th century.

Later Period
After the end of World War I, Mondrian moved back to Paris and at the age of forty-seven
began creating the iconic abstract paintings for which he is best known. Within the milieu of
1920s Paris, he created a unique mode of abstraction compared to the contemporary
movements of Surrealism and Paris Dada. Mondrian's paintings of the 1920s are the clearest
expression of his ideal of purity and universal harmony in Neo-Plastic expression. It was only
around 1925 that Mondrian began to receive recognition for his contribution to modernism,
with his paintings entering the collections of wealthy Europeans and Americans.In 1938, He
moved to New York City to escape the turmoil of World War II. There he joined the artistic
community and was extremely influential among a younger group of artists who started the
Abstract Expressionist movement during the 1940s.
Expanding his pictorial vocabulary, he introduced double lines, then color lines and finally the
black grid was replaced with pulsating lines of color squares. Inspired by his new surroundings
within the American metropolis, his late paintings show a new energy and complexity of
composition as evidenced in Broadway Boogie-Woogie(1943).
Devoted to his work, Mondrian's life reflected the purity and discipline of his art. He remained
unmarried and lived simply with few possessions. He died of pneumonia in 1944 while working
on Victory Boogie-Woogie, which remained unfinished.

Legacy
His work was immediately referenced by the Bauhaus, particularly in the simplified lines and
colors of the school's aesthetic. Mondrian's style can be seen in the developments of the
Minimalists of the late 1960s, who also opted for reduced forms and a pared down palette.
Not only influential within modern art, Mondrian's far-reaching impact can be seen across all
aspects of modern and postmodern culture.