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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 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 1872 - 1912 ==
Born at Amersfoort in The Netherlands as Pieter
Cornelis Mondriaan, he began his career as a
teacher in Education in the Netherlands|primary
education, but while teaching he also practiced
painting. Most of his work from this period is
naturalistic or impressionism|impressionistic,
consisting largely of landscapes. These pastoral
images of his native Holland depict windmills,
fields, and rivers, initially in the Dutch
Impressionist manner of The Hague School, and then
using a variety of styles and techniques
documenting his search for a personal voice. These
paintings are most definitely representational,
and illustrate the influence that various artistic
movements had on Mondrian, including pointillism
and the vivid colors of fauvism. 

On display in The Hague's Gemeentemuseum is a
number of paintings from this period, including
such post-impressionist works as "The Red Mill"
and "Trees in Moonlight". One 1908 painting called
"Avond" ("Evening"), a scene of haystacks in a
field at dusk, even augurs future developments by
using a palette consisting almost entirely of red,
yellow, and blue. Although it is in no sense
abstract, "Avond" is the earliest of Mondrian’s
works to emphasize the primary colors.

The earliest paintings that show an inkling of the
abstraction to come are a series of canvases
dating from 1905 to 1908, which depict dim scenes
of indistinct trees and houses with reflections in
still water that make them appear almost like
Rorschach inkblot test|Rorschach ink blots.
However, although the end result leads the viewer
to begin emphasizing the forms over the content,
these paintings are still firmly rooted in nature,
and it is only the knowledge of Mondriaan’s
later achievements that leads one to search for
the roots of his future abstraction in these
works.

Mondriaan's art was always intimately related to
his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908,
he became interested in the Theosophy|theosophical
movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in
the late 19th century. Blavatsky believed that it
was possible to attain a knowledge of nature more
profound than that provided by empirical means,
and much of Mondriaan's work for the rest of his
life was inspired by his search for that spiritual
knowledge.

Mondriaan and his later work were deeply
influenced by the Moderne Kunstkring exhibition of
Cubism held in Amsterdam in 1911. His search for
simplification is shown in two versions of
"stilleven met gemberpot" ("still life with ginger
pot"). The 1911
versionhttp://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/ar
tist_work_lg_112_9.html is cubist, in the 1912
versionhttp://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/ar
tist_work_lg_112_11.html it is reduced to a round
shape with triangles and rectangles.

== Paris 1912 - 1914 ==
In 1912, Mondrian moved to Paris and changed his
name (dropping an 'a' from Mondriaan) to emphasize
his departure from life in the artistic backwater
of Holland. From this point on, he signed his work
as
"Mondrian"http://www.inghist.nl/Onderzoek/Projecte
n/BWN/lemmata/bwn1/mondriaan. While in Paris, the
influence of the cubism of Picasso and Braque
appeared almost immediately in Mondrian's work.
Paintings such as "The Sea" (1912) and his various
studies of trees from that year still contain a
measure of representation, but they are
increasingly dominated by the geometric shapes and
interlocking planes commonly found in cubism.
However, while Mondrian was eager to absorb the
cubist influence into his work, it seems clear
that he saw cubism as a road leading to an end,
rather than an end in itself.

== 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.

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:

:"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


: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."

== Paris 1919 - 1938 ==

When the war ended in 1919, Mondrian returned to
France, where he would remain until 1938. Immersed
in the crucible of artistic innovation that was
post-war Paris, he flourished in an atmosphere of
intellectual freedom that enabled him to
courageously embrace an art of pure abstraction
for the rest of his life. Mondrian began producing
grid-based paintings in late 1919, and in 1920,
the style for which he came to be renowned began
to appear. 

In the early paintings of this style, such as
Composition A (1920) and Composition B (1920), the
lines delineating the rectangular forms are
relatively thin, and they are gray, not black. The
lines also tend to fade as they approach the edge
of the painting, rather than stopping abruptly.
The forms themselves, smaller and more numerous
than in later paintings, are filled with primary
colors, black, or gray, and nearly all of them are
colored; only a few are left white.

Beginning in late 1920 and 1921, Mondrian’s
paintings arrive at what are their definitive and
mature form to casual observers. Thick black lines
now separate the forms, which are larger and fewer
in number, and more of them are left white than
was previously the case. This was not the
culmination of his artistic evolution, however.
Although the refinements became more subtle,
Mondrian’s work continued to evolve during his
years in Paris. 

In the 1921 paintings, many of the black lines
(but not all of them) stop short at a seemingly
arbitrary distance from the edge of the canvas,
although the divisions between the rectangular
forms remain intact. Here too, the rectangular
forms are still mostly colored. As the years
passed and Mondrian’s work evolved further, he
began extending all of the lines to the edges of
the canvas, and he also began to use fewer and
fewer colored forms, favoring white instead. 

These tendencies are particularly obvious in the
“lozenge” works that Mondrian began producing
with regularity in the mid-1920s. The lozenge
paintings are square canvases tilted 45 degrees,
so that they hang in a diamond shape. Typical of
these is "Schilderij No. 1: Lozenge With Two Lines
and Blue" (1926), also known as "Composition With
Blue" and "Composition in White and Blue," which
is currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art. One of the most minimal of Mondrian’s
canvases, this painting consists only of two
black, perpendicular lines and a small triangular
form, colored blue. The lines extend all the way
to the edges of the canvas, almost giving the
impression that the painting is a fragment of a
larger work.

Although one is hampered by the glass protecting
the painting, and by the toll that age and
handling have obviously taken on the canvas, a
close examination of this painting begins to
reveal something of the artist’s method.
Mondrian’s paintings are not composed of
perfectly flat planes of color, as one might
expect. Brush strokes are evident throughout,
although they are subtle, and the artist appears
to have used different techniques for the various
elements. 

The black lines are the flattest elements, with
the least amount of depth. The colored forms have
the most obvious brush strokes, all running in one
direction. Most interesting, however, are the
white forms, which clearly have been painted in
layers, using brush strokes running in different
directions. This generates a greater sense of
depth in the white forms, as though they are
overwhelming the lines and the colors, which
indeed they were, as Mondrian’s paintings of
this period came to be increasingly dominated by
white space.  

"Schilderij No. 1" can be said to represent the
most extreme extent of Mondrian’s minimalism. As
the years progressed, lines began to take
precedence over forms in his painting. In the
1930s, he began to use thinner lines and double
lines more frequently, punctuated with a few small
colored forms, if any at all. Double lines
particularly excited Mondrian, for he believed
they offered his paintings a new dynamism which he
was eager to explore.

== London & New York 1938 - 1944 ==

In September 1938, Mondrian left Paris in the face
of advancing fascism and moved to London. After
the Netherlands were invaded and Paris fell in
1940, he left London for New York City, where he
would remain until his death. Some of Mondrian’s
later works are difficult to place in terms of his
artistic development, because there were quite a
few canvases that he began in Paris or London,
which he only completed months or years later in
New York. However, the finished works from this
later period demonstrate an unprecedented
busyness, with more lines than any of his work
since the 1920s, placed in an overlapping manner
that is almost cartographical in appearance.

In 1933, Mondrian had produced "Lozenge
Composition With Four Yellow Lines," a simple
painting that introduced what for him was a
shocking innovation: thick, colored lines instead
of black ones. After that one painting, this
practice remained dormant in Mondrian’s work
until he arrived in New York, at which time he
began to embrace it with abandon. In some examples
of this new direction, such as "Composition"
(1938) / "Place de la Concorde" (1943), he appears
to have taken unfinished black-line paintings from
Paris and completed them in New York by adding
short perpendicular lines of different colors,
running between the longer black lines, or from a
black line to the edge of the canvas. The
newly-colored areas are thick, almost bridging the
gap between lines and forms, and it is startling
to see color in a Mondrian painting that is
unbounded by black. Other works mix long lines of
red amidst the familiar black lines, creating a
new sense of depth by the addition of a colored
layer on top of the black one.

The new canvases that Mondrian began in New York
are even more startling, and indicate the
beginning of a new idiom that was unfortunately
cut short by the artist’s death. "New York City"
(1942) is a complex lattice of red, blue, and
yellow lines, occasionally interlacing to create a
greater sense of depth than ever before. An
unfinished 1941 version of this work uses strips
of painted paper tape, which the artist could
rearrange at will to experiment with different
designs. 

His painting "Broadway Boogie-Woogie" at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City is highly
influential in the school of
Geometric_abstract_art|abstract geometric
painting. The piece is made up of a number of
shimmering squares of bright color that leap from
the canvas, then appear to shimmer, drawing you
into those neon lights.  

Mondrian’s final works, "Broadway Boogie Woogie"
(1942-43) and the unfinished "Victory Boogie
Woogie" (1942-44), replace the solid lines with
lines created from tiny adjoining rectangles of
color, created in part using small pieces of paper
tape in various colors. Larger unbounded
rectangles of color punctuate the design, some
with smaller concentric rectangles inside them.
While Mondrian’s works of the 1920s and 1930s
tend to have an almost scientific austerity about
them, these are bright, lively paintings,
reflecting the upbeat music that inspired them and
the city in which they were made. 


Mondrian wrote, in a postcard to James Johnson
Sweeney, planner of a retrospective exhibition of
the artist’s works at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, that “only now in 1943, I become
conscious that my work in black, white, and little
color planes has been merely ‘drawing’ in oil
color. In drawing, the lines are the principal
means of expression; in painting, the color
planes. In painting, however, the lines are
absorbed by the color planes; but the limitation
of the planes show themselves as lines and
conserve their great value.”  In these final
works, the forms have indeed usurped the role of
the lines, opening another new door for
Mondrian’s development as an abstractionist. The
“boogie woogie” paintings were clearly more of
a revolutionary change than an evolutionary one,
representing the most profound development in
Mondrian’s work since his abandonment of
representational art in 1913. Unfortunately, we
were to have only a glimpse of this new
innovation. Piet Mondrian died in New York City in
1944, of pneumonia at the age of 71, and was
interred in the Cypress Hills Cemetery in
Brooklyn, New York.
 
The apparent simplicity of Mondrian's most
well-known works have led some people to believe
that anyone, even a child, could paint them.
However, careful study of Mondrian's neoplastic
compositions makes it clear that they are utterly
original works that are extremely difficult to
reproduce with the same effect that he generated.
Moreover, such works are the culmination of a
decades-long conceptual journey through modern art
that involved experimentation with many different
styles and movements. Mondrian's oft-emulated
reductionist style continues to inspire the art,
fashion, advertising, and design worlds. Although
he was a fine artist (not a commercial artist),
Mondrian is considered the father of advertising
design, because of the widespread and continued
adoption of his grid style as a basic structure of
graphic design layout.

==References==
* Schapiro, Mondrian: On the Humanity of Abstract
Painting (George Braziller 1995).
* Bax, Marty. Complete Mondrian. Hampshire: Lund
Humphries, 2001.
* Faerna, José María, ed. Mondrian: Great Modern
Masters. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995.
* Joosten, Joop J. and Welsh, Robert P. Piet
Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1998.
* Mondrian, Piet, Harry Holtzman, ed., and Martin
S. James, ed. The New Art – The New Life: The
Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian. New York: Da
Capo Press, 1993.

== Major works ==
* (1908) Molen (Mill); Mill in Sunlight
* (1908) Avond (Evening); Red Tree
* (1908) Chrysanthemum (painting)|Chrysanthemum
http://www.art.com/asp/sp-asp/_/pd--10083376/Large
_Chrysanthemum_c_1908.htm
* (1908) Evening, Red Tree
* (1908) Windmill by the Water
* (1909) Landscape (painting)|Landscape
* (1909-10) The Red Tree
* (1910) Amaryllis (painting)|Amaryllis
* (1910-11) Evolution (painting)|Evolution
* (1910-11) The Red Mill
http://www.soho-art.com/cgi-bin/shop/shop.pl?fid=1
044454597&cgifunction=form
* (1911) Gray Tree
* (1911) Horizontal Tree
* (1911) Still Life with Ginger Pot I
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_wo
rk_lg_112_9.html -- cubist
* (1912) Still Life with Ginger Pot II
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_wo
rk_lg_112_11.html -- simplified
* (1912) Apple Tree in Bloom
* (1912-1913) Trees (painting)|Trees
* (1912-1914) Scaffoldings
* (1913) Composition No. II; Composition in Line
and Color
* (1915) Ocean 5
http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/mods/philosophy/se43251-
6/se4325-6/sld016.htm
* (1917) Composition III with Color Planes
* (1918) Composition with Color Planes and Gray
Lines 1
* (1918) Composition with Gray and Light Brown
* (1919) Composition with Grid VII
* (1919) Composition: Checkerboard, Dark Colors
* (1920) Composition A: Composition with Black,
Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue
* (1920) Composition with Black, Red, Gray,
Yellow, and Blue
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/mondrian/mondri
an_composition_a.jpg.html
* (1921) Tableau I
* (1921) Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black,
Blue, Red, and Gray
* (1921) Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red,
Black, Yellow, and Gray
* (1922) Composition with Blue, Yellow, Black, and
Red
* (1922) Composition No. 2 (painting)|Composition
#2
* (1925) Lozenge Composition with Red, Black,
Blue, and Yellow
* (1925) Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue,
Yellow, and Black
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/mondrian/mondri
an_lozenge.jpg.html
* (1927) Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue
* (1929) Fox Trot; Lozenge Composition with Three
Black Lines
* (1930) Composition with Yellow Patch
* (1930) Composition with Yellow
* (1932) Composition with Blue and Yellow
* (1935-42) Composition No. III Blanc-Jaune
* (1935-42) Rhythm of Straight Lines
http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/mondrian/studies
/du3.html
* (1935-42) Rhythm of Black Lines
* (1936) Composition blanc, rouge et jaune or
Composition in White, Black and Red
* (1936) Vertical Composition with Blue and White
* (1937-42) Abstraction (painting)|Abstraction
* (1939-42) Composition No. 8
* (1939-42) Painting No. 9 (painting)|Painting #9
* (1939-1942) Composition No. 10
* (1942) New York City I
* (1942-43) Broadway Boogie-Woogie
http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?
object_id=78682
* (1943) Place de la Concorde (painting)|Place de
la Concorde http://www.inter-art.com/en/10491.htm
* (1943-44) Victory Boogie-Woogie
http://www.outlawnet.com/~thissen/mondriaan.htm

== External links ==
commons|Piet Mondriaan
* http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/mondrian.html
Mondrian at Artchive
* http://www.mondriaan.net/ The Mondriaan site
*
http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_wo
rks_112_0.html Guggenheim NY Mondrian collection
*
http://www.suphawut.com/art/western/piet_mondrian.
htm "Piet Mondrian, His Work and de Stijl"
* http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rac101/draw/mondrian/
Computer-Generated Random Pseudo-Mondrian Images