Famous Piet Mondrian Paintings
Famous Piet Mondrian Paintings
In 1911, Mondrian moved to Paris and changed his name (dropping an ‘a’ from Mondriaan) to emphasize his departure from The Netherlands. This matched the changed signature on his works that is dated to before 1907. While in Paris, the influence of the Cubism style of Picasso and Georges Braque appeared almost immediately in Mondrian’s work.
Paintings such as The Sea (1912) and his various studies of trees from that year still contain a measure of representation, but increasingly, they are dominated by the geometric shapes and interlocking planes commonly found in Cubism. While Mondrian was eager to absorb the Cubist influence into his work, it seems clear that he saw Cubism as a ‘port of call’ on his artistic journey, rather than as a destination.
Unlike the Cubists, Mondrian still attempted to reconcile his painting with his spiritual pursuits, and in 1913, he began to fuse his art and his theosophical studies into a theory that signaled his final break from representational painting. World War I began while Mondrian was visiting home in 1914 and he was forced to remain in the Netherlands for the duration of the conflict.
During this period, he stayed at the Laren artist’s colony, there meeting Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg. Both of these artists were undergoing their own personal journeys toward abstraction at the time. Van der Leck’s use of only primary colors in his art greatly influenced Mondrian.
After a meeting with Van der Leck in 1916, Mondrian wrote, “My technique which was more or less Cubist, and therefore more or less pictorial, came under the influence of his precise method.” With Van Doesburg, Mondrian founded De Stijl (The Style), a journal of the De Stijl group in which he published his first essays defining his theory, for which he adopted the term neoplasticism.
Mondrian published “De Nieuwe Beelding in de schilderkunst” (“The New Plastic in Painting”)[12] in twelve installments during 1917 and 1918. This was his first major attempt to express his artistic theory in writing. Mondrian’s best and most often-quoted expression of this theory, however, comes from a letter he wrote to H.P. Bremmer in 1914:
I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things… I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.