Piet Mondrian’s work can sometimes be hard to appreciate.
These shuffling colourful squares and these intersecting black lines make his paintings
all blend together, as if each of them were unique, yet identical at the same time.
But this particular style was only one step in Mondrian’s quite linear artistic progression.
He was born in 1872 in Amersfoort, Netherlands and will start painting, just like many other
dutch artists, landscapes.
Already then, he adopts unconventional techniques.
For example, most dutch landscapes displayed the famous Netherlands sky and its puffy clouds,
but Mondrian, in At Work on the Land, made in 1898, puts the horizon line extremely high,
not leaving much space for any clouds.
He then explored many different movements such as impressionism, as seen in Willow Grove:
Impression of light and shadows made in 1905.
He also explores post-impressionism as seen in Evening; Red Tree completed in 1910 in
which we can clearly see the influence coming form Van Gogh.
Mondrian also had a fauvist phase which will preface the importance of primary colours
in his later work.
But in 1911, an art movement will heavily influence him.
He discovers, through Picasso and Braque, cubism and will move to Paris to further his
career.
In 1911, he paints a first version of Still Life with Gingerpot and then, the following
year, reinterprets the painting in a cubist style.
The intersecting black lines first make their appearance.
Mondrian will slowly start to move away from representation which we can see by comparing
his older tree paintings with The Gray Tree, painted in 1911.
Only one year later, he will, again, make one step closer to abstraction with another
representation of a tree, Flowering Apple Tree.
He will continue to make abstract paintings in Paris until 1914, when, during a visit
in the Netherlands, WW1 begins, not allowing Mondrian to go back in France.
This will make Mondrian meet other dutch artist such as Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg.
Together, they will create the De Stijl movement in which Mondrian defines Neo Plasticism.
He will write:
As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically
purified, that is to say, abstract form.
The new plastic idea cannot therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation
– this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say,
natural form and colour.
On the contrary it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that
is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.
This will be the birth of the Mondrian we know of today with the colours and the geometry.
But it’s only in the 1920s that Mondrian will start painting the iconic compositions.
Those will also evolve with time.
The first compositions usually had more colours and shapes and sometimes, the black lines
wouldn’t even reach the edge of the canvas.
With time though, Mondrian purified his work, stripping away more and more elements.
His compositions started to include less colours, but sometimes more lines, making his work
seem more minimalistic or simplified.
Finially, in 1938, with the rise of fascism in Europe, Mondrian moves to London and, in
1940, decides to move to New York City.
This will be the last step in Mondrian’s artistic evolution.
Even though he’s 68 when he moves to New York, he is captivated by the energy this
city has.
The busy streets, the booming culture and especially jazz music will animate him.
The black lines in his compositions will be replaced by colourful lines overlapping each
other.
The last painting Mondrian completes is called Broadway Boogie-Woogie, a representation of
the grid-like streets of New York.
The lines are vivid and, unlike in any other Mondrian paintings, they are continuously
interrupted by colour.
The lines are not continuous anymore, they are extremely busy, almost as if they had
a certain rhythm to them.
Mondrian wanted to create universal art.
Art that, through its harmony and simplicity, could appeal to any individual, no matter
their background.
By simplifying what he painted, Mondrian broke down his subjects to their core essence: lines,
shapes and colours and arranged them in order to create balance.
You may admire Mondrian’s work, or maybe you don’t see what’s so interesting about
his horizontal and vertical lines, but what’s less debatable is how fascinating Mondrian’s
quest for purification is.
You might not like his individual artworks, but Mondrian’s work, as a whole, is interesting
to analyze as it’s the work of a lifetime.
From the post-impressionist trees, to the cubist branches, all the way to the streets
of New York; Mondrian’s artistic progress, is in itself, a work of art.