Piet Mondrian
The purist of straight lines.
Mondrian moved from landscape via Cubism to pure abstraction. With the De Stijl group he sought a universal pictorial order.
Piet Mondrian was born in 1872 in Amersfoort in the Netherlands. His father was a headmaster and a strictly religious Calvinist. Mondrian trained as a drawing teacher and then studied at the academy of art in Amsterdam. In his early years he painted landscapes in the Dutch tradition: windmills, farms, rivers and trees in muted colours.
Around 1908 his colours grew stronger. He was influenced by Fauvism and by Theosophy, a spiritual movement that sought a hidden order behind things. The picture Evening, in which a red tree stands against a blue sky, shows the transition. In 1911 he moved to Paris and encountered Cubism. In a series of pictures of trees he simplified the branches step by step until only a network of lines remained.
During the First World War he stayed in the Netherlands. In 1917 he founded the journal and group De Stijl together with Theo van Doesburg. Mondrian called his art Neo-Plasticism. He restricted himself to straight black horizontal and vertical lines and to red, yellow and blue, along with white, black and grey. The aim was a universal, harmonious order, freed from the incidental. He broke with van Doesburg when the latter began using diagonals.
The pictures look simple, but he worked on each painting for a long time, moving lines and fields millimetre by millimetre to achieve the right balance. His studio in Paris was arranged like one of his works, with coloured panels on the walls. He loved jazz and dancing. The threat of Nazism led him to move to London in 1938 and to New York in 1940.
In New York his pictures became livelier. Broadway Boogie Woogie of 1942–1943, in which the black lines have been replaced by small blocks of colour that flicker like the city’s traffic and the rhythms of jazz, is in the Museum of Modern Art. He died in 1944. The largest collection of his work is in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. His visual language has influenced architecture, design and fashion throughout the 20th century.