Piet Mondrian

Biography

Mondrian took over his New York studio on East 59th Street in the autumn of 1943 and furnished it his own way: he painted the walls off-white, built the table, seats and storage cases from discarded orange and apple crates, and covered the top of a metal stool in red. On the walls hung coloured paper rectangles, which he rearranged again and again.

He lived there for a few months.

Pieter Cornelis Mondrian was born on 7 March 1872 in Amersfoort, the son of the head of a Christian primary school. His father was also a drawing teacher and taught him to draw early; his uncle Frits, a painter from the circle of the Hague School, helped as well. The family moved to Winterswijk, where his father took charge of a school. Mondrian first qualified to teach drawing in primary schools, and in 1892 he came to Amsterdam and entered the State Academy of Fine Arts. He earned his living as he could: painting tiles, designing bookplates, copying pictures in museums, taking portrait commissions. In 1898 and 1901 he failed the anatomy part of the examination for the Prix de Rome.

His early pictures are windmills, fields and rivers in the manner of the Hague School, followed by night and evening landscapes influenced by the large Van Gogh exhibition of 1906. In 1908 he became interested in theosophy, and in 1909 he joined the Dutch branch of the Theosophical Society. In those years he also painted flowers, and he returned to them in the 1920s, by his own account to friends for money. The triptych “Evolution” (1910–1911) shows a woman at successive stages of spiritual awakening. At the Cubist exhibition in Amsterdam in 1911 he saw Cubism seriously for the first time, and in December he left for Paris.

In Paris he dropped one “a” from his surname: Mondriaan became Mondrian. He settled in a studio on the Rue du Départ and painted trees and the sea, breaking them into intersecting planes. To my mind he regarded Cubism as a stop along the way, not a destination: in a letter of 1914 he wrote of constructing lines and colour combinations on a flat surface in order to express universal beauty.

In the summer of 1914 he came to the Netherlands to see his sick father, the war began, and he could not go back. He lived in Domburg, then in the artists’ colony at Laren. There he made the series “Pier and Ocean”, his first abstract works. At Laren he grew close to Bart van der Leck, whose pure primary colours affected him strongly, and to Theo van Doesburg. With Van Doesburg he founded the journal De Stijl (“The Style”) in 1917, and in 1917–1918 he published in it the essays “The New Plastic in Painting”, an exposition of his theory of Neoplasticism. In 1921 the booklet “Neo-Plasticism” appeared.

In 1919 Mondrian returned to Paris and lived there until 1938. His canvases grew clearer: first thin grey lines and many small coloured cells, then, from 1920–1921, thick black lines, larger planes and more white. Later the lines ran to the edges of the canvas and colour became sparser. In the mid-1920s came the “lozenge” paintings: square canvases turned through 45 degrees. In the early 1920s his relations with Van Doesburg cooled, and after Van Doesburg introduced the diagonal in 1924 they parted for good. In the 1930s Mondrian used double lines more often. He furnished his Paris studio on the same principles; the photographs of his apartment, pipe and glasses were taken by André Kertész in 1926.

In September 1938 he left for London, and on 23 September 1940 he sailed from Liverpool for New York. Some canvases he began in Paris or London and finished in Manhattan only months or years later, such as “Composition No. 12”, begun in 1936 and completed in 1942. In New York the black lines gave way to coloured ones. In “New York City” red, blue and yellow lines cross in places, and in “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” (1942–1943) and the unfinished “Victory Boogie Woogie” the lines became chains of small coloured rectangles, some of them built up from strips of coloured paper tape. He loved jazz and played it in the studio on a record player wrapped in red cardboard.

Mondrian died on 1 February 1944 in New York. The memorial was held on 3 February at the Universal Chapel; about two hundred people came, among them Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger and Alexander Calder. He is buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery. His friends Harry Holtzman and Fritz Glarner recorded the studio on film and in photographs before opening it to the public for six weeks. Holtzman, the artist’s heir, traced the wall compositions precisely and fixed the surviving paper pieces to facsimiles. These “Wall Works” have been shown in New York, Tokyo, São Paulo and Berlin.