Piet Mondrian Art

1872-1944 - Born in the Netherlands in 1872, Piet Mondrian attended the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Art. He visited Paris in 1912 and returned to Amsterdam in 1914 where he stayed during the First World War. In 1915 Mondrian teamed up with Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck to form a movement called De Stijl. He returned to Paris in 1919, working there until 1938 when the German Occupation forced him to move to London invited by the painter Ben Nicholson, then finally to New York in 1940. In New York, Mondrian met American painters and exhibited with the American Abstract Artists Group. He died in 1944 and was buried in Brooklyn.

By 1908, Mondrian was using Fauve colors in landscape paintings, and by the end of the decade he had embraced Cubism creating angular compositions of trees. In 1921, Mondrian began using his signature pictorial language which he termed neoplasticism - asymmetrical arrangements of rectangles painted in primary colors divided by black bands on a white ground. Mondrian was in search of transcendent experience and pure harmony or equilibrium, and he saw his paintings as a model of a harmonious world.

In New York Mondrian’s style changed. Influenced by modern architecture, urban culture and jazz, the new paintings used bands of color broken up by small squares of other color defining rectangular forms. Rather than seeking equilibrium, as did the earlier paintings, these works were lyrical and dynamic reflecting energy and movement Mondrian found in New York City life.