Piet Mondrian Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story Web Services & Hosting by The Computer Studio | Designed by DesArtLab De Stijl De Stijl Founded in the Netherlands in 1917, De Stijl was an avant-garde dedicated to isolating a single visual style that would be appropriate to all aspects of modern life, from art to design to architecture. Taking its name from a periodical, its most famous practitioners were Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, whose mature art employed geometric blocks of primary colors and vertical and horizontal lines. Luminism Luminism Luminism refers to a mid-nineteenth-century American school of painting, in which artists emphasized the effects of light and shadow in expansive landscapes. Luminism is related to French Impressionism given their respective emphases on light, but differs in that the American artists hid their brushstrokes and paid closer attention to their subjects' finer details. Impressionism Impressionism A movement in painting that first surfaced in France in the 1860s, it sought new ways to describe effects of light and movement, often using rich colors.

The Impressionists were drawn to modern life and often painted the city, but they also captured landscapes and scenes of middle-class leisure-taking in the suburbs. Cubism Cubism Cubism was developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque between 1907-1911, and it continued to be highly influential long after its decline. This classic phase has two stages: 'Analytic', in which forms seem to be 'analyzed' and fragmented; and 'Synthetic', in which pre-existing materials such as newspaper and wood veneer are collaged to the surface of the canvas. Post-Impressionism Post-Impressionism Post-Impressionism refers to a number of styles that emerged in reaction to Impressionism in the 1880s. The movement encompassed Symbolism and Neo-Impressionism before ceding to Fauvism around 1905. Its artists turned away from effects of light and atmosphere to explore new avenues such as color theory and personal feeling, often using colors and forms in intense and expressive ways. Vincent van Gogh Vincent van Gogh Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter, commonly associated with the Post-Impressionist period.

As one of the most prolific and experimental artists of his time, van Gogh was a spontaneous painter and a master of color and perspective. Troubled by personal demons all his life, many historians speculate that van Gogh suffered from a Bipolar disorder. Georges Seurat Georges Seurat Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French painter who gave rise to the Post- and Neo-Impressionist artistic styles of the late nineteenth century. Seurat's greatest contribution to modern art was his development of Pointillism, a style of painting in which small dots of paint were applied to create a cohesive image. Combining the science of optics with painterly emotion, Pointillism evoked a visual harmony never before seen in modern art. Pablo Picasso Pablo Picasso Picasso dominated European painting in the first half of the last century, and remains perhaps the century's most important, prolifically inventive, and versatile artist. Alongside Georges Braque, he pioneered Cubism. He also made significant contributions to Surrealist painting and media such as collage, welded sculpture, and ceramics. Georges Braque Georges Braque Georges Braque was a modern French painter who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed analytic Cubism and Cubist collage in the early twentieth century.

Theo van Doesburg Theo van Doesburg Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, who together with Piet Mondrian established the De Stijl movement. Van Doesburg's most famous work experimented with geometric abstraction and archetypal forms. He was also a prominent architect and writer. Surrealism Surrealism Perhaps the most influential avant-garde movement of the century, Surrealism was founded in Paris in 1924 by a small group of writers and artists who sought to channel the unconscious as a means to unlock the power of the imagination. Much influenced by Freud, they believed that the conscious mind repressed the power of the imagination. Influenced also by Marx, they hoped that the psyche had the power to reveal the contradictions in the everyday world and spur on revolution. Dada Dada Dada was an artistic and literary movement that emerged in 1916. It arose in reaction to World War I, and the nationalism and rationalism that many thought had led to the War. Influenced by several avant-gardes - Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism - its output was wildly diverse, ranging from performance art to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting and collage.

Emerging first in Zurich, it spread to cities including Berlin, Hanover, Paris, New York and Cologne. Bauhaus Bauhaus Bauhaus is a style associated with the Bauhaus school, an extremely influential art and design school in Weimar Germany that emphasized functionality and efficiency of design. Its famous faculty - including Joseph Albers and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - generally rejected distinctions between the fine and applied arts, and encouraged major advances in industrial design. Minimalism Minimalism Minimalism emerged as a movement in New York in the 1960s, its leading figures creating objects which blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and were characterized by unitary, geometric forms and industrial materials. Emphasizing cool anonymity over the passionate expression of the previous generation of painters, the Minimalists attempted to avoid metaphorical associations, symbolism, and suggestions of spiritual transcendence. Paul Cézanne Paul Cézanne Paul Cézanne was an influential French Post-Impressionist painter whose depictions of the natural world, based on internal geometric planes, paved the way for Cubism and later modern art movements.

Jan Toorop Jan Toorop Jan Toorop was born on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies, and was best known as a Symbolist and Art Nouveau painter. Toorop's influences were vast, ranging from Japanese motifs and Post-Impressionism to Realism and Catholic mythology. Bart van der Leck Bart van der Leck Bart van der Leck was a Dutch painter and designer, who along with Mondrian and van Doesburg founded the De Stijl movement. Van der Leck's quasi-abstract paintings, comprised of geometric shapes and deconstructed forms, were often based on real world imagery. Fauvism Fauvism Fauvism was an early twentieth-century art movement founded by Henri Matisse and André Derain. Labeled as "wild beasts", Fauve artists favored vibrant colors and winding gestural strokes across the canvas. Ilya Bolotowsky Ilya Bolotowsky Ilya Bolotowsky was a Russian-born American artist and long-time instructor at Black Mountain College. After immigrating to the U.S.

in 1923, he became a member of "The Ten," along with artists Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, and later on was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. His work contributed greatly to the styles of Neo-Plasticism and Geometric Abstraction. Leon Polk Smith Leon Polk Smith Leon Polk Smith was an American painter and is considered one of the founders of Hard-Edge painting. Smith's work was unique among the Hard Edge school, as he often used round or strangely-shaped canvases. Raised by parents who were part-Cherokee, Smith took much inspiration from Native American art and history. Ad Reinhardt Ad Reinhardt Ad Reinhardt was an American abstract artist whose monochromatic canvases show side-by-side rectangles painted in subtle variations of the same color. Very much part of the New York scene in the 1940s, he nonetheless scorned the label and gestural ethos of Abstract Expressionism. Peggy Guggenheim Peggy Guggenheim Peggy Guggenheim, the neice of Solomon R. Guggenheim, was a collector, patron, and eclectic personality deeply connected to modern art.

She gave important exhibitions to many Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist artists at her Art of This Century gallery in New York in the 1940s. Abstract Expressionism Abstract Expressionism A tendency among New York painters of the late 1940s and '50s, all of whom were committed to an expressive art of profound emotion and universal themes. The movement embraced the gestural abstraction of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and the color field painting of Mark Rothko and others. It blended elements of Surrealism and abstract art in an effort to create a new style fitted to the postwar mood of anxiety and trauma. Color Field Painting Color Field Painting A tendency within Abstract Expressionism, distinct from gestural abstraction, Color Field painting was developed by Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still in the late 1940s, and developed further by Helen Frankenthaler and others. It is characterized by large fields of color and an absence of any figurative motifs, and often expresses a yearning for transcendence and the infinite.

Biography - Piet Mondrain - Dutch Abstract Painter, Cubism, Impressionism, Neo-Plasticism Biography Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) Born into a Dutch aristocratic family in Amersfoort, Piet Mondrian began his study of art in 1892 as a student at Amsterdam's Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. His earliest landscapes are rendered in an Impressionistic style but, possess the marked vertical and horizontal tendencies that foreshadow his mature paintings. Mondrian's work began to show the influences of Cubism in 1910 after an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam that included works by Picasso and Braque. In 1912, the artist moved to Paris where he continued to refine his style, continually exploring increasingly sophisticated compositions. In his paintings, Mondrian strove to achieve a universal form of expression by reducing form and color to their simplest components.

The artist termed his work "Neo-Plasticism" and believed: "it is the task of art to express a clear vision of reality." Using only primary colors and basing his compositions entirely on rectangles, Mondrian painted increasingly stark, structurally harmonious compositions with an unrivaled chromatic purity. Mondrian moved to New York in 1940 to escape the disruptions of World War II. Energized by the pace of city life, the artist was extremely productive and completed a large number of paintings. Mondrian's late works, executed during his years in New York, use vacillating color and grid-like patterns to evoke the fast-paced rhythm of city streets. He is regarded by many as founder of abstract art.

Piet Mondrian | Dutch painter | Britannica.com Piet Mondrian Alternative Title: Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan Piet Mondrian Claude Monet Piet Mondrian, original name Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (born March 7, 1872, Amersfoort, Netherlands—died February 1, 1944, New York , New York, U.S.), painter who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major exponent of the Dutch abstract art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”). In his mature paintings, Mondrian used the simplest combinations of straight lines, right angles, primary colours, and black, white, and gray. The resulting works possess an extreme formal purity that embodies the artist’s spiritual belief in a harmonious cosmos. Mondrian, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1942. © Arnold Newman Early life and works Pieter was the second child of Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Sr., who was an amateur draftsman and headmaster of a Calvinist primary school in Amersfoort .

The boy grew up in a stable yet creative environment; his father was part of the Protestant orthodox circle that formed around the conservative Calvinist politician Abraham Kuyper , and his uncle, Frits Mondriaan, belonged to the Hague school of landscape painters. Both uncle and father gave him guidance and instruction when, at age 14, he began to study drawing. Mondrian was determined to become a painter, but at the insistence of his family he first obtained a degree in education; by 1892 he was qualified to teach drawing in secondary schools. That same year, instead of looking for a teaching position, he took painting lessons from a painter in a small town not far from Winterswijk, where his family resided, and then moved to Amsterdam to register at the Rijksacademie. He became a member of the art society Kunstliefde (“Art Lovers”) in Utrecht , where his first paintings were exhibited in 1893, and in the following year he joined the two local artist societies in Amsterdam. During this period he continued to attend evening courses at the academy for drawing, impressing his professors with his self-discipline and effort.

In 1897 he exhibited a second time. Up to the turn of the century, Mondrian’s paintings followed the prevailing trends of art in the Netherlands: landscape and still-life subjects chosen from the meadows and polders around Amsterdam, which he depicted using subdued hues and picturesque lighting effects. In 1903 he visited a friend in Brabant (Belgium), where the calm beauty and clean lines of the landscape proved to be an important influence on him. When he stayed on in Brabant the following year, he experienced a period of personal and artistic discovery; by the time he returned to Amsterdam in 1905, his art had visibly changed. The landscapes he began to paint of the surroundings of Amsterdam, mainly of the Gein River, show a pronounced rhythmic framework and lean more toward compositional structure than toward the traditional picturesque values of light and shade. This vision of harmony and rhythm, achieved through line and colour , would develop toward abstraction in later years, but during this period his painting still remained more or less within the traditional boundaries of contemporary Dutch art.

Farm Along the River Gein, oil on canvas on board by Piet Mondrian, … In a private collection Influence of Post-Impressionists and Luminists Britannica Stories Cheetahs Face Extinction Risk In 1907 Amsterdam sponsored the Quadrennial Exhibition, featuring such painters as Kees van Dongen , Otto van Rees, and Jan Sluijters, who were Post-Impressionists using pure colours in bold, nonliteral ways. Their work was strongly influenced by the forceful expression and use of colour in the art of Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh , whose work had been featured in a large exhibition in Amsterdam in 1905. Such daring use of colour was reflected in Mondrian’s Red Cloud, a rapidly executed sketch from 1907. By the time he painted Woods near Oele in 1908, new values began to appear in his work, including a linear movement that was somewhat reminiscent of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and a colour scheme—based on hues of yellow, orange, blue, violet, and red—that was suggestive of the palette of contemporary German Expressionist painters.

With this vigorous painting of considerable size, Mondrian broke away from the national tradition of Dutch painting. Art & Architecture: Fact or Fiction? His new style was reinforced by his acquaintance with the Dutch artist Jan Toorop , who led the Dutch Luminist movement, an offshoot of French Neo-Impressionism . The Luminists, like the Neo-Impressionists, rendered light through a series of dots or short lines of primary colours. Mondrian concentrated on this use of colour and limited his palette to the primary hues: he proved his mastery of this evocation of strong, radiant sunshine in paintings such as Windmill in Sunlight (1908), executed mainly in yellow, red, and blue. But he moved beyond the tenets of the movement and expressed visual concerns that would remain constant in his oeuvre . In a painting such as The Red Tree, also dated from 1908, he expressed his own vision of nature by creating a balance between the contrasting hues of red and blue and between the violent movement of the tree and the blue sky, thus producing a sense of equilibrium , which would remain his prevailing aim in representing nature.

In 1909 Mondrian’s Luminist works were exhibited in a large group show at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, which firmly established him as part of the Dutch avant-garde. Facade of a House, Zeeland, oil on canvas on cardboard by Piet … In a private collection Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies That year was important for Mondrian’s career from another point of view: in May he joined the Theosophical Society , a group that believed in a harmonious cosmos in which spirit and matter are united. Inspired by these ideas, Mondrian began to free the objects depicted in his paintings from naturalistic representation: these objects became formal components of the overall harmony of his paintings, or, in other words, the material elements began to merge with the overall spiritual message of his work. He concentrated on depicting large forms in nature, such as the lighthouse in Westcapelle. In Evolution (1910–11), a triptych of three standing human figures, the human figure and architectural subjects look surprisingly similar, thus stressing Mondrian’s move toward a painting grounded more in forms and visual rhythms than in nature.

In 1910 Mondrian’s Luminist works attracted considerable attention at the St. Lucas Exhibition in Amsterdam. The next year he submitted one of his more abstract paintings to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, his first bid for international recognition. Cubist period in Paris Concurrent with the spiritual influence of theosophy was Mondrian’s exposure to new visual ideas. Dutch artists were increasingly aware of the radical work of Paul Cézanne and of the Cubist painters. The Dutch avant-garde began to call for new standards in their national art that would incorporate such trends and move beyond traditional landscape painting. Active in avant-garde circles, Mondrian was very influenced by these ideas. In 1911 he saw for the first time the early Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque . He was profoundly impressed, so much so that early in 1912 he moved to Paris, where he settled in the Montparnasse district. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Almost immediately he began to adapt the precepts of Cubism to his own use, as evidenced in two versions of Still Life with Gingerpot, done during the winter months of 1911–12.

In the first version, the objects are rendered as recognizable forms from everyday life; in the second, he transformed the same objects into compositional structures, taking his drive toward abstraction further than he ever had before. Mondrian’s Cubist period lasted from 1912 to 1917. His compositions of trees, architectural facades, and scaffoldings during this period are proof of his urge to reduce individual forms to a general formula. Mondrian kept somewhat within the boundaries of Cubism by utilizing the Cubists’ limited colour palette of ochre, brown, and gray, so as not to distract from form, and by painting large blocks of colour. He also observed the Cubist scheme of composition , in which geometric divisions are used and the painting gravitates toward a central focus, leaving the corners of the canvas almost untouched; the result of this scheme was his series of oval compositions. But in an attempt to reduce the elements of his composition even further, Mondrian avoided curved lines and diagonal accents and increasingly used only vertical and horizontal lines.

He went beyond Analytical Cubism’s tendency to break individual objects into their component parts by instead striving for a vision of reality that surpassed depicting the individual object altogether: from 1913 onward his style began its evolution toward total abstraction. In the summer of 1914 Mondrian returned to the Netherlands to visit his father, who was seriously ill, and the outbreak of World War I prevented him from returning to Paris. He settled at Laren, where he became acquainted with M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, a theosophical philosopher whose works on the symbolical meaning of lines and on the mathematical construction of the universe had a decisive influence on Mondrian’s vision of painting. In his work, the artist had long been moving toward seeing the canvas as a site of spiritual awakening for the viewer; this achieved theosophy’s goal of bringing about a state of heightened consciousness during the experience of everyday life. With the ideas of Schoenmaekers, he now had a distinct set of graphic rules, closely related to his own developing formal vocabulary, through which he could achieve this goal of merging art and life.

These discoveries pushed his Cubist style to its extreme limits, particularly in his painting of the church at Domburg and in a new theme, captured in a series of works known as Pier and Ocean. The ultimate version of this theme, completed in 1917 and shown at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, marks the final stage of his Cubist style: an oval painting composed of black vertical and horizontal line fragments on a white background. The birth of De Stijl Trending Topics Srinivasa Ramanujan Continuing these radical developments, in 1917 Mondrian and three other painters— Theo van Doesburg , Bart van der Leck, and Vilmos Huszar—founded the art periodical and the movement of De Stijl. The group advocated the complete rejection of visually perceived reality as subject matter and the restriction of a pictorial language to its most basic elements of the straight line, primary colours, and the neutrals of black, white, and gray.

In the movement’s journal, De Stijl, Mondrian essentially laid out all his visual theories; because he contributed so extensively to the first issues of the journal, the early style of De Stijl has become synonymous with his own (in later years the movement was more a reflection of the ideas of van Doesburg, the true leader of the movement). The scope of this new style of line and colour, for which Mondrian coined the name neoplasticism , was to free the work of art from representing a momentary visual perception and from being guided by the personal temperament of the artist. The vision that Mondrian had moved toward for so long now seemed to be within reach: he could now render “a true vision of reality” in his painting, which meant deriving a composition not from a fragment of reality but rather from an overall abstract view of the harmony of the universe. A painting no longer had to begin from an abstracted view of nature; rather, a painting could emerge out of purely abstract rules of geometry and colour, since he found that this was the most effective language through which to convey his spiritual message.

Mondrian’s first neoplastic paintings were composed of rectangles in soft hues of primary colours painted on a white background with no use of line. His compositions were based on colour and appear to expand over the borders of the canvas into space beyond the picture. In 1918 he reintroduced lines into his painting, linking the colour planes to one another and to the background by a series of black vertical and horizontal strips, thus creating rectangles of colour or noncolour. In 1918 and 1919 he executed a series of rhomboid compositions, subdivided into a pattern of regular squares differentiated by thick black lines and by soft hues of ochre, gray, and rose. Also in 1919, he created two versions of a checkerboard composition, one in dark and one in light colours, in which the difference of the hues transforms this common pattern into a rhythmic sequence of squares, which play off each other to suggest vibrancy and movement. The titles of his works reflect this move to pure abstraction: whereas his earlier work had titles invoking the abstracted elements of nature or architecture depicted, his work during this period generally had titles such as Composition with Gray, Red, Yellow, and Black (c.

1920–26) and Diagonal Composition (1921). He returned to Paris in 1919, but he retained his close collaboration with De Stijl. By publishing his theories in the booklet Le Néo-plasticisme in Paris in 1920, Mondrian began to spread his ideas throughout Europe. Later years Some of Mondrian’s friends organized an exhibition of his works at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on the occasion of his 50th birthday. It was a retrospective progression of his paintings, tracing the path from his beginnings in the Dutch traditional style to his abstract paintings, firmly establishing the artist’s pivotal role in the international art world’s move toward abstraction. He had reached his goal, but he did not stand still: he continued to explore the relationship between lines and blocks of colour, achieving an ever-increasing purity in his paintings. Although he did not exhibit frequently and rarely held a one-man show, in the early 1930s he became affiliated with Cercle et Carré and with Abstraction-Création , both of which were influential international groups of artists who promoted and exhibited abstract art.

In 1934 he met the American artist Harry Holtzman and the English painter Ben Nicholson . Nicholson urged him to publish his essay “ Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art,” Mondrian’s first essay in English, in the international publication Circle, of which Nicholson was coeditor. In this way, Mondrian’s ideas continued to gain an even broader audience. When Mondrian decided to leave Paris in 1938, under the shadow of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Adolf Hitler , he was welcomed in London by members of the Circle group. For two years he worked and lived in a London suburb, but the bombardment of the city forced him to flee to New York City in 1940, where he was welcomed by Holtzman, the art collector Peggy Guggenheim , art critic and museum director James Johnson Sweeney, and other members of the American artistic vanguard. There, Mondrian’s style entered its last phase. Throughout the 1930s, Mondrian’s work had become increasingly severe.

Inspired by his regained freedom, New York City’s pulsating life, and the new rhythms of American music, after 1940 he broke away first from the austere patterns of black lines, replacing them with coloured bands. Then, in place of the continuous flow of these bands, he substituted a series of small rectangles that coalesced into a rhythmic flow of colourful vertical and horizontal lines. His late masterpieces—New York City I and Broadway Boogie Woogie, exhibited in 1943–44, in his first personal exhibition in more than two decades—express this new vivacity through the autonomous , joyous movement of colour blocks. Buoyed by his hope for a better future, Mondrian started his Victory Boogie Woogie in 1942; it remained unfinished when he succumbed to pneumonia in 1944. Assessment The consistent development of Mondrian’s art toward complete abstraction was an outstanding feat in the history of modern art, and his work foreshadowed the rise of abstract art in the 1940s and ’50s. But his art goes beyond merely aesthetic considerations: his search for harmony through his painting has an ethical significance.

Rooted in a strict puritan tradition of Dutch Calvinism and inspired by his theosophical beliefs, he continually strove for purity during his long career, a purity best explained by the double meaning of the Dutch word schoon, which means both “clean” and “beautiful.” Mondrian chose the strict and rigid language of straight line and pure colour to produce first of all an extreme purity, and on another level, a Utopia of superb clarity and force. When, in 1920, Mondrian dedicated Le Néo-plasticisme to “future men,” his dedication implied that art can be a guide to humanity, that it can move beyond depicting the casual, arbitrary facts of everyday appearance and substitute in its place a new, harmonious view of life. Piet Mondrian 1872–1944 | Tate Artist biography Piet Mondrian 1872-1944 Dutch pioneer of abstract art, who developed from early landscape pictures to geometric abstract works of a most rigorous kind. Born in Amersfoort, Utrecht. Studied painting at the Amsterdam Academy 1892-4 and again, part-time, 1896-7.

Friendship with the painter Simon Mans and painted landscapes in the Hague School tradition. Began to work in a more vividly coloured and sometimes pointillist style in 1908, joined the Theosophic Organisation in 1909 and made some works of a Symbolist character. First one-man exhibition with C.R.H. Spoor and Jan Sluyters at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1909. Lived in Paris 1912-14; was influenced by Cubism , which he carried to the point of abstraction. Returned to Holland in 1914 and step by step evolved a more simplified abstract style which he called Neo-Plasticism , restricted to the three primary colours and to a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines on a white ground; associated with van Doesburg in the de Stijl movement 1917-25. Lived 1919-38 in Paris where he joined the group Abstraction-Création in 1931.

Moved to London 1938-40, living near Gabo and Ben Nicholson, then in 1940 to New York where he started to develop a more colourful style, with coloured lines and syncopated rhythms. Died in New York. Published in: Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.532-3 Piet Mondrian - 22 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy Piet Mondrian Overview Works Articles Shows Auction Results Related Artists Biography Avoiding references to the real world, and using only the primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), the primary values (black, white, and grey), and the primary directions (horizontal and vertical), Piet Mondrian created abstract paintings through which he sought to reveal universal harmony and order. This idealistic pursuit was shared by his fellow Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg . Together they cofounded the pioneering and highly influential movement De Stijl (The Style) in 1917.

Through De Stijl, Mondrian and van Doesburg galvanized an artistic response to what they believed would be the beginning of a new era after World War I, where art and life would be integrated. His Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930), with its gridded black lines locking squares of color into a geometric composition, exemplifies the visual vocabulary he created to express his ideas. Dutch, 1872–1944, Amersfoort, Netherlands Piet Mondrian-paintings,biography,quotes of Piet Mondrian. Contact Us Piet Mondrian and his paintings Piet Mondrian is a Dutch painter who has carved a unique niche for himself on the global platform matching the likes of other celebrity painters. He is possibly best known for being one of the founders of the De Stijl, which incorporated an art movement that worked around abstract works, and the new art forms that were being introduced to the world in the early 20th century. The movement was also based on the reductive theory; which took a larger scale image, and brought it to life on the canvas, in architectural works, and in sculpture forms, and in the form of graphic arts as well.

Piet Mondrian was born in the Netherlands, and received his formal training there; he attended the Rijksadame van Beeldende in Amsterdam. Mondrian was born 24 years after Van Gogh , but the art was the same as it had been when Van Gogh went away into the marshes to paint. Mondrian took an interest in impressionist techniques and this form of art with the early works that he did. Like Van Gogh, Mondrian use pure, glowing colors and expressive brushwork under the influence of pointillism and Fauvism. The still life images, the landscape design work, and other scenes which he depicted in his early career, all depicted this style. The first decade of the 20th century, Piet Mondrian began to make a transition in the works that he would create. The work moved towards a pointillist and cubist style of art, as well as other abstract mediums that he engaged in during this early stage of his career. In 1912, he made the move to Paris, to gain further knowledge of the avante grand style of work.

This move took place after he saw exhibits which featured works from Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque , and was interested in the styles they followed, and the extreme intricacy of the work which they had created during the courses of their career. Due to the fact that he was visiting his home in the Netherlands when World War I began, Piet Mondrian was not able to return to Paris for a short period of time, and had to remain at home, where he again developed a new style of work, and took on a different approach to the works which he created during this time in his life. During this period, when he was at home and in Holland, he decided to work on an abstract art form and developed a neoplastic style. The work which he produced during this period was depicted by lighter colors, simplified color selection, and forms that were balanced in their compositions. He also developed work which delved in to the spiritual realm, and created more of a connection with religion, and his faith, as opposed to the prior works which were not focused on this point.

Once the war had come to a close, Piet Mondrian decided to return to Paris; upon his arrival, he began to work with Theo van Doesburg, as well as other famous artists in the area, and this is when they developed the De Stijl movement which was quite famous, and is possibly what Piet Mondrian is most well known for during the course of his extensive career. The group was formed in 1917, and it extended the aesthetic principles to architecture, sculpture, canvas, and graphic art design which Piet Mondrian followed. Upon a disagreement with van Doesburg, about the use of diagonal lines in painting and art work, Piet Mondrian decided to leave the group, and to start to work on new movements, and new forms of art he had not really entered in to in the past. In 1931, he jointed the Abstraction- Creation line, which was more open to new styles, to new techniques, and to a difference in styles of work, which the artists would create. In 1932, a major retrospective exhibition of Mondrian's work was held at the Stedelijk Museum, in honor of the artist's 60th birthday.

It was around this time that the painter began to be fascinated with the idea of the line and dismantling the very definition of painting. Drawing and draughtsmanship - exemplified in the line -, he argued, had always lain at the heart of painting, from the Renaissance artists to the Impressionists to the Modernists, and no one had ever thought to challenge that. When World War II began, Piet Mondrian decided to make the move over to London, and he eventually wound up in the US, living in New York. In 1942 he held his first solo exhibit; this was only a few years prior to his death in 1944. The work was presented in a large gallery in NYC, and was accepted by visitors as well as his piers in the art world. In addition to being a celebrated artist, and founder of different art groups and reforms, Piet Mondrian also wrote a number of pieces during his career. He had many of these pieces published. His writings dealt with neoplasticism and how the art form had changed, and with abstract work in general.

He published a number of theoretical texts during the course of his life, and they were published in various magazines and other art articles, during the course of his career. Piet Mondrian not only is a leader in progressive styles and change in form, but he is also well known around the world due to the fact that his art work is published around the world, and that so many of his famous pieces are housed in different parts of the world. He has work in several galleries in New York, including the first open one person exhibit that he did, just a few years prior to his death. In addition to work published in New York, there are also pieces that sit in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Outside of the US, he also has work that is on display in Paris, in Switzerland, in Amsterdam, and in many other museums and exhibits which are located around the world. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.” - Piet Mondrian Due to his appeal with the different forms, and his ability to create work that touched so many, Piet Mondrian is one of the well known artists who began his work early in the 20th century.

Although he was born outside of the US, he did eventually make his way to the Western World, and was able to become quite famous in his own right, for the quality and styles that he took on with his work. He is not only known as a famous abstract painter in the US, but also in his home town in Amsterdam, and in Paris where he made a brief stay, to learn about the different forms and artists he was interested in. The Paris Studio of Mondrian that he established for creating some of the best artistic gems has been made iconic, which serves as an inspiration to the modern painters. More specifically, the wall works that Mondrian brought to the fore can never be ignored for sure. Tate Gallery in London houses one of the best works created by Mondrian every by experimenting with the latest color combinations. Perhaps, this has proved to be major asset of his in later part of his life. Precisely, one of his paintings titled Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red mesmerizes art lovers still because of the unique freshness it has got. In fact, there are such countless observations of Piet Mondrian that are known to make a huge impact upon the emerging painters easily.

MOST POPULAR PAINTINGS Piet Mondrian Biography - Childhood, Life Achievements & Timeline Painters Piet Mondrian Biography Piet Mondrian was a famous Dutch painter. This biography provides detailed information on his childhood, life, works, achievements and timeline. Quick Facts No Image Credit Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, famously known as Piet Mondrian, was a Dutch painter who produced revolutionary artistic works in The Netherlands, France, England and United States, in the course of his lifetime. He is known to be a pioneer in the development of the modern abstract art - the form of art that was only just beginning to take its form while Mondrian was experimenting with different expressions. He was a chief proponent of the newly formed Dutch abstract art movement known as the De Stijl (The Style) art movement; the movement was founded by another great Dutch artist named Theo van DoesburgâMondrian was highly influenced by him, while he was still searching the right spiritual expression for his artistic endeavors. In his paintings, he played with the simplest amalgamation of straight lines, right angles, primary colors, and black, white, and gray.

The work produced as an effect of this possessed an intense ceremonial wholesomeness that exemplified his spiritual belief in a harmonious cosmos. A lot of work that Mondrian had left undone in Paris and London because he had to move to United States due to the threat of growing fascism in Europe, he finished it in Manhattan. Childhood & Early Life Mondrian was born in Amersfoort, Netherlands, to Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan. His father was a Head Teacher at a local school; he was also a qualified drawing teacher and was responsible in initiating his son into the world of art. Mondrian attended the Academy for Fine Art, Amsterdam, in 1892 and later became a Primary Education teacher while practicing painting side by side. There are number of his paintings that are displayed in the Gemeente museum, Hauge, belonging to this period. Career Mondrian got himself deeply involved in the theosophical movement in 1908, launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and, in the following year, he joined the Dutch branch of the Theosophical Society. All of this influenced his paintings very much.

The Moderne Kunstkring exhibition of Cubism, Amsterdam in 1911 also made a deep impact on his paintings. His quest to find artistic simplification is clear with the two versions of his famous painting âStill Life with Ginger Potâ. In 1911, he went to settle in Paris and also changed his name from âMondriaanâ to âMondrianâ. During this time, his work also showed some influence of painters like, Picasso and Georges Braque. Mondrian treated his art and paintings as his ultimate spiritual detections and in 1913, he increasingly started to merge his artistic pursuits and his theosophical studies into a theory, which symbolized his ultimate split from the representational painting. In 1914, he visited The Netherlands but around this time the tension because of the impending World War I was brewing up, which forced him to stay. During this time he started a journal âDe Stijlâ with Van Doesburg.

After publishing his essays in âDe Stijlâ, Mondrian published âDe Nieuwe Beelding in de schilderkunstâ during 1917 and 1918. Through this book he tried to communicate his artistic theory, influences and justifications in writing rather than in painting. After the war ended, he went back to France and it was here that he realized his love towards abstraction in art. From 1919, he started making grid-based paintingsâa style that he still remains very renowned for. In between 1920-1921, his painting style transformed and started taking a mature form. His paintings now had thick black lines delineating and separating the forms, which were larger and fewer in number. During the 1920s, Mondrian started to produce the âlozengeâ works and his tendency to include abstract art in his painting technique is visible in these works. Lozenge paintings are square canvases tilted 45 degrees--hanging in a diamond shape. âSchilderij No.

1: Lozenge With Two Lines and Blue (1926)â (also known as Composition With Blue and Composition in White and Blue), is currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Artâis the most minimalistic of his watercolors. Because of growing fascism in Paris, Mondrian left for London in 1938 and after The Netherlandsâ invasion, he moved to Manhattan, United States. A lot of work that he began in Paris and London, he finally finished in Manhattan. He produced works in Manhattan, like: âLozenge Composition With Four Yellow Lines (1933)â, a simple painting that portrayed something that Mondrian did not ever experiment with before - thick, colored lines instead of black ones. His art took a new direction in Manhattan - his âComposition (1938)â and âPlace de la Concorde (1943)â portrays how he took fragmentary black-line paintings from Paris and finished them in Manhattan by introducing lines of different colors.

Major Works Mondrian evolved in his artistry over the years; he started with representational paintings but influenced with the De Stijl movement, he evolved into a non-representational painterâa form of art that he named neoplasticism and majorly contributed to it. Personal Life & Legacy Mondrian died in New York in 1944 because of pneumonia. He was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. Trivia His memorial service was attended by artists like: Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, etc. At the age of 71, Mondrian moved into his second and final Manhattan studio at 15 East 59th Streetâaccording to him it was the best space he had ever acquired for a studio. His friends, artist Harry Holtzman, and another painter friend, Fritz Glarner, documented the studio on video and photographs before the studio was made available for a six-week exhibition. In 2008, the Dutch television program âAndere Tijdenâ telecast the only known movie footage with Mondrian.

Translate this page to Spanish, French, Hindi, Portuguese Pictures of Piet Mondrian Piet Mondrian biography Piet Mondrian biography Due to the artist's less than flamboyant lifestyle and temperament, a Mondrian biography is easily written. This does not however, reduce the importance of the work of this very exciting artist and this Piet Mondrian biography serves as a tribute, as well as a source of information. Pieter Cornelis Mondrian was born on March 7th 1872 in Amersvoort in central Holland and lived there for the first eight years of his life. He was the second child of four, with two brothers and one sister. His father Pieter Cornelis Sr. was headmaster of an elementary school, a gifted draftsman and amateur artist. Uncle Frits Mondrian was a self-taught painter and commercially successful, even the Russian court bought his work. As Piet Jr. progressed towards abstract art, he came into conflict with uncle Frits, which seems to have had something to do with Piet Mondrian signing his paintings with "Piet Mondrian" (instead of Mondriaan) from 1912 on.

The Mondrians, devout Calvinists, were an artistic family who painted and made music and Mondrian Sr. could afford a decent education for his four children. Early on Piet Jr. proved to have a talent for drawing. His father gave him drawing lessons and took his son to the countryside to sketch. Uncle Frits taught him the basics of painting. As a teenager Mondrian was thoroughly educated in drawing and visited several schools. His education was complemented by a retired art-teacher Baet van Ueberfeldt. Mondrian Sr. intended his son to become a drawing teacher so that Piet would be able to make a living. Mondrian won his licences and was allowed to teach at primary and secondary schools. With his licences under his belt, having fulfilled his father's demands, Piet Mondrian decided to become an artist, not a teacher, in 1892. His father could not afford an education at the National Academy of Art in Amsterdam, but Uncle Frits managed to obtain an allowance for Piet Mondrian; he was 20 when he moved to Amsterdam.

There he studied either full time or attended evening classes and joined several artist's societies where he exhibited his work, for the first time in 1893 (he was 21). He got some commissions, like a ceiling painting and he applied for several prizes, with varying degree of success. In 1903 (at 31) he won his first prize from the "Arti et Amicitae Society". Traveling back and forth between Amsterdam and various parts of rural Holland he devoted practically all of his time to painting landscapes, first in the style of the "The Hague School", then gradually more and more abstract, omitting details he regarded as irrelevant. The more abstract his work became, the more appreciation and recognition he gained from fellow artists and other forward thinking contemporaries, at the same time the more criticism he met, particularly from Dutch art critics, "This man is totally confused". Particularly important were his trips to Domburg, a small town on an island, that was turned into an artist's community by Jan Toorop, one of the leading Dutch artists then, not in the least because of his organizational flair.

Toorop acted as the principle intermediate between the Dutch and French art communities and devoted much of his time to bringing artists together. In 1909 Piet Mondrian joined a theosophical society, which not only meant a definitive break with the orthodox Christian believe-system of his parents, but also became the foundation of his thinking and the intellectual side of his art. In these years Mondrian begins to resemble Rasputin in appearance (at least I think so) and he meditates. Like many artists of his time, Mondrian can be regarded as a hippy "avant la letre", although later his appearance changes again, making him a sharply dressed man, indistinguishable from your average stockbroker or bookkeeper. This change may be connected to his love of nature and the country, changing into a preference for the city. In his work this translates into his initial interest in the quasi random and disorderly quality of nature (the way branches on trees grow, the shape and distribution of clouds), which then changes into his well known paintings that consist of horizontal and vertical lines, the horizontal representing femininity and the worldly, the vertical masculinity and the spiritual.

In his neo-plasticism he aimed to create a balance between the horizontal and the vertical, in tune with the laws of the universe, as he saw them, and his theosophical believes. Around 1909, 1910 his breakthrough came insofar that he came to be regarded as one of the leaders of the Dutch avant-garde, of course still getting bad journalistic criticism. In 1910 he became a full member of the jury of an art society. In 1911 he was exposed for the first time by the works of the cubists Braque and Picasso , at an exhibition in Amsterdam. It is assumed that this made him want to move to Paris, the center of French art and cubism . Arriving in Paris in 1912, he quickly became internationally famous with exhibitions in Paris and Berlin. Piet Mondrian lived in Montparnasse, near the Eiffel Tower and enjoyed the city, with it's exhibitions, parties and night-life. He was an avid dancer, preferably with young women. Piet Mondrian sold little in Paris, but made a living copying famous paintings from the Louvre. In 1914 World War I began.

Piet Mondrian had returned to Holland to visit his father who was mortally ill. Trapped in Holland, Piet Mondrian would not see Paris for four years because of the war, his equipment and paintings still in Paris. His father died in 1915. In that year he moved to Laren, in Holland, which then was an artist's community attracting artists like Van Der Leck and Van Doesburg. The latter founded a magazine called "De Stijl" (The Style) for which Piet Mondrian wrote a few articles. Van Doesburg brought together a group of artists that contributed to the magazine. They were of the opinion that artists, architects and sculptors should work together to create a new society that would be in tune with "the laws of the universe". The art that went with it should be clear in form and spiritual, as opposed to earthly. Natural forms were earthly, straight lines and angles spiritual. Thus "it would not be impossible to create a paradise on Earth", they said. Now De Stijl is known as an art movement, almost synonymous with the red, yellow and blue neo-plasticism paintings of Piet Mondrian.

Not feeling at home in Holland, Piet Mondrian returned to Paris in 1919, where he had a book published, called Le N�o-Plasticisme, containing his essays written for De Stijl and it was translated in German in 1925. In Paris he had some more exhibitions, joined an art group, but perhaps most importantly, he met the American artist Harry Holtzman in Paris, in 1934. Holtzman later enabled Piet Mondrian to go to America, where he had his finest years as an artist. While in Paris, he painted the walls and furniture of his Paris apartment/studio white and decorated the walls with grey and red cartboard rectangles, as he was living within a painting of his. During his years in Paris, Mondrian's reputation as an international representative of abstract art grew, but with art-insiders particularly. His paintings still didn't fetch high prices as they never would during his lifetime. Mondrian didn't really seem to mind. He had fulfilled his artistic dreams. After Hitler had come to power in 1933, Mondrian's work was put on the list of "Entartete Kunst" (degenerate art).

Presumably having learned from his experiences during World War I, in which he had to leave all his paintings in Paris, Mondrian left Paris in September 1938, before the German invasion. He lived for two years his London where he became befriended with artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. As the Germans increased pressure on England, Mondrian left London in September 1940, in the midst of the blitz. On borrowed money, Mondrian arrived in New York in October 1940. Harry Holtzman had found and paid for his apartment and studio and introduced him to his friends. In New York Mondrian concluded his career with monumental works like "Broadway Boogie-Woogie" and (the unfinished) "Victory Boogie-Woogie". In 1944 (he was almost 72) Piet Mondrian died of pneumonia in a New York hospital. This concludes this site's biography of Piet Mondrian. The next part represents this author's view on Piet Mondrian and his work. Tribute to Piet Mondrian One can arbitrarily divide Piet Mondrian's work into two, the dividing line being his "Tree series".

Most first class artists would have been satisfied going on with painting trees the way Mondrian did. I can't think of any other painting that conveys the soul of the Northern European landscape more deeply as his trees. Mondrian's "Red Tree", "Blue Tree" and "Grey Tree" are artistic masterpieces. Technically however, they look strangely insecure. With the "Red Tree" Mondrian seemed unable to render the foreground as convincingly as the rest. Two artists can arrive at the same point independently, but it seems likely that, like many artists of his generation, he was inspired by Vincent van Gogh while making the "Red Tree". A serious artist who tries to "paint like Van Gogh" is in trouble, however. Van Gogh is one the greatest "composers" in the history of the visual arts. Composing in this context, is meant to represent the ability to fit a great many details together in the best possible coherence. Mondrian was a very able landscape artist, but to paint in Van Gogh's expressive semi-abstract style is another matter. I hypothesize that Mondrian was overtaxed.

The "Grey Tree" represents the limit (now in a cubist style) of how far Mondrian could go in creating a composition that is "spontaneously" painted, with semi-improvised brush-strokes. It has been suggested that Mondrian pursued an abstract style to break with his domineering father, who was a draftsman and strict naturalist. One can always come up with some kind of Neo-Freudian speculation on another man's mind; it seems more sensible to look for an artistic explanation, which there is, in my opinion. Mondrian was, not commercially or socially, but artistically ambitious. He wanted to paint like the great, but ran into the limits of his ability. Mondrian could draw very well, he was well-trained and his drawings do not should show any signs of insecurity. "The whims of nature" can be captured with a pencil on paper, but painting adds other dimensions, such as color and the texture of the paint. Whether his presumed inability to render nature as he wanted is responsible for his growing dislike of nature, that developed during his life is an open question. Abstract painting however, has the advantage that it's a more controlled environment.

The abstract artist has a greater freedom to define his own artistic and technical parameters than the naturalist. Mondrian's earlier neo-plastic works are compositionally quite simple, with carefully arranged rectangles, but with few details. In New York however, he created his "Boogie Woogie" paintings, which to my mind are among the best compositions of the 20th century. And thus Mondrian achieved his goal: to become one of the greatest painters in history. While he had stretched his talent to the limit 20 years earlier, in the subsequent period he cleverly and intelligently developed a style that enabled him to circumvent his limitations and turn his career into an absolute success. See also: Piet Mondrian Biography (Artist) Best known as: Dutch abstract artist with the colored rectangles Name at birth: Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan, Jr. Piet Mondrian was a 20th century abstract painter whose most famous compositions are made up of black lines and colored rectangles. Mondrian's early works were naturalistic and impressionistic landscapes, but his discovery of cubism around 1910 put him on the path toward pure abstraction.

He left his home in the Netherlands for Paris in 1912, but returned to the Netherlands in 1914 to care for his sick father. He remained there during World War I, exploring abstract forms and formulating an approach he called neo-plasticism. Back in Paris after the war, he made what may be his most famous painting, Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue (1921), a composition of primary colors in rectangles on a grid of black lines. In 1938 he went to England and in 1940 he moved to New York, where he continued to discard "non-essentials" and restrict his works to "basic forms of beauty." Influenced by the philosophical approach of theosophy, Mondrian believed painting to be a two-dimensional interpretation of nature that is guided by the artist's intuition. His paintings include Still Life with Ginger Pot I (1911), Composition (1916) and Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). Copyright © 1998-2017 by Who2?, LLC. All rights reserved.

Question: What nationality was painter Piet Mondrian?
Answer: Dutch