Amersfoot, Holland, 1872-New York, 1944

Mondrian was connected with the Dutch Neoplastic art movement associated with the magazine De Stijl.

His first works were peaceful landscapes, painted in delicate greys, mauves and dark greens. In 1908, under the influence of the painter Jan Toorop, he began to experiment with more brilliant colours, while in 1911 Mondrian left for Paris, where he started to paint in the Cubist style. Gradually his work became increasingly abstract. In 1917, together with the painter Theo van Doesburg and a group of young architects and artists, he founded the magazine De Stijl, which until 1924 would serve them as the platform to promote Neoplasticism, an art which departed from nature and which aimed to represent the absolute truths of the universe. Mondrian's painting from then on consisted solely of straight lines and fields of primary colour.

In 1925 he left the group and in 1931 joined the August Herbin's group Abstraction-Création. In 1938 Mondrian emigrated to London but in the autumn of 1940, following the bombing of that city and the entry of the Germans into Paris, he decided to accept the invitation of the American painter Harry Holtzman and move to New York. In America his style lost its earlier rigidity and took on a greater freedom and livelier rhythm.





Mondrian, 1872-1944. Exhibition catalogue Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1971.

GREEN, ch.: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The European Avant-gardes. Art in France and Western Europe 1904-c.1945. London, 1995.

Krauss, R.: The Originality of the Avant-garde and other Modernist Myths. New York, 1985.

Mondrian, P.: The New Art-The New Life. The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian. London, 1987.

Seuphor, M.: Piet Mondrian. Life and Work. New York, 1956.


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