Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Dutch painter, who carried abstraction to its furthest limits. Through radical simplification of composition and colour, he sought to expose the basic principles that underlie all appearances.

He was born in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, on March 7, 1872, and originally named Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan. Despite his family's objections, he embarked on an artistic career, studying at the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts. His early works, through 1907, were calm landscapes painted in delicate greys, mauves, and dark greens. In 1908, under the influence of the Dutch painter Jan Toorop, he began to experiment with brighter colours; this represented the beginning of his attempts to transcend nature. Moving to Paris in 1911, Mondrian adopted a Cubist-influenced style, producing analytical series such as Trees (1912-1913) and Scaffoldings (1912-1914). He moved progressively from seminaturalism through increased abstraction, arriving finally at a style in which he limited himself to small vertical and horizontal brushstrokes.

In 1917 Mondrian and the Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg founded De Stijl, a magazine in which Mondrian developed his theories of a new art form he called Neo-Plasticism. He maintained that art should not concern itself with reproducing images of real objects, but should express only the universal absolutes that underlie reality. He rejected all sensuous qualities of texture, surface, and colour, reducing his palette to flat primary colours. His belief that a canvas—a plane surface—should contain only planar elements led to his abolition of all curved lines in favour of straight lines and right angles. His masterly application of these theories led to such works as Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (1927, Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio), in which the painting, composed solely of a few black lines and well-balanced blocks of colour, creates a monumental effect out of all proportion to its carefully limited means.

When Mondrian moved to New York in 1940, his style became freer and more rhythmic, and he abandoned severe black lines in favour of lively chain-link patterns of bright colours, particularly notable in his last complete masterwork, Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Mondrian was one of the most influential 20th-century artists. His theories of abstraction and simplification not only altered the course of painting but also exerted a profound influence on architecture, industrial design, and the graphic arts. Mondrian died in New York on February 1, 1944.