Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian – Support from his uncle and father, art studies in Amsterdam

Paul Mondrian was born in Amersfoort in the Netherlands on 7 March 1872. He held his name of Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan throughout his childhood and youth until 1912, and received instruction in the basics of painting from his uncle, the interior and landscape painter Frits Mondriaan. His mother’s weak health and his father’s regular absence overshadowed Mondrian’s childhood and ensured that he was unable later to enter into long-term emotional commitment. Although Piet Mondrian’s father supported his son’s drawing talent, he wished that his son had chosen a career as teacher. Piet did not feel he was suitable for this however and began studies at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam and developed a growing interest in theosophy. Mondrian studied the writings of Éduard Schuré and applied unsuccessfully twice for the Prix de Rome. The sale of two still lifes and a portrait enabled Mondrian to travel to Spain accompanied by his painter friend Simon Maris.

Foundation of the De Stijl group, development of Neoplasticism

During his early years as an independent painter in the Netherlands, Piet Mondrian could be placed first close to Impressionism and from 1905 to Fauvism, but came into contact with Cubism during one of his first visits to Paris and subsequently oriented himself to the works of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. The main focus of his creativity at this time was landscape pictures, preferably trees and mills. His painting style became ever more abstract and his friendship with the art theorist and painter Theo van Doesburg led to the foundation of the artist group De Stijl, to which the painter Bart van der Leck and the architect Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud also belonged. In the decade of his membership, Piet Mondrian drew up his great artistic concept of Neoplasticism and thus became the most formative figure of the collective, although he turned his back on it in 1925 after a quarrel with Theo van Doesburg. Mondrian moved again to Paris, where the First World War had left his studio and the paintings he had left behind at the outbreak of the war intact.

Escape to London and New York, the last successful years

Piet Mondrian found a generous sponsor in the Dutch art collector Salomon B. Slijper who assisted him through a crisis in his life and creativity, whilst the patron and painter Katherine Sophie Dreier purchased many of Mondrian’s pictures. He received a questionable honour in 1937 from the National Socialists when Mondrian was one of the few overseas artists to be exhibited at the notorious exhibition Entartete Kunst in Munich. Mondrian recognised the signs of the times and followed his painter friend Ben Nicholson to London but as the German bombs fell, he escaped further to New York where he exerted great influence on the painter Charmion von Wiegand whose work was oriented on Piet’s neoplasticist painting style. With other exiled artists such as Marc Chagall, Roberto Matta, Yves Tanguy, Kurt Seligmann, Max Ernst and Fernand Léger, he exhibited in the Gallery Pierre Matisse in New York and it was Pierre Matisse who extolled Mondrian in a letter to his father Henri Matisse as the saint of abstraction. Mondrian contributed decisively to the career of the young Jackson Pollack when he so exuberantly praised Pollack’s painting Szenographic Figure to Peggy Guggenheim that she began to promote Pollock.

Piet Mondrian died in New York City on 1 February 1944 from a lung infection.