Birth Year : 1877
Death Year : 1944
Country : Netherlands
Piet Mondrian, one of the principle artists responsible for twentieth-century
non-objective painting, was born in Amersfoort, Holland. He studied at
the Amsterdam Academy and began his career by painting landscapes which
owe a debt to seventieth-century Dutch art, to Impressionism and later,
by 1908, to Expressionism. From 1911 to 1914 Mondrian lived in Paris where
his close contact with Cubist ideas reinforced his path from naturalism
to abstraction. Cubist faceted planes appear in his work of 1912 to 1914,
yet the picture space is already narrower and more frontal. In 1917 he
was among the founding members of the De Stijl group in Holland, whose
goal was to create a universal art independent of individual emotions by
setting out such general aesthetic criteria as: form restricted to the
rectangle, color limited to the primaries (red, yellow, blue) and to black,
white and gray and composition formed from perpendicular planes asymmetrically
arranged. Characteristic of Mondrian's work, these principles were later
elaborated upon in his treatise on Neo-Plasticism published in 1921. To
Mondrian the world of the picture was its own truth-its own "plastic" reality.
Color, line, form, composition, and rhythm, independent of natural appearances
and personal emotions, reveal a cosmic order. This order in art brought
man in balance and with universe, his only chance to overcome human suffering
and unhappiness. Mondrian painted in Holland, Paris and London until 1940
when he moved to New York, living there until his death in 1944. In New
York he painted the famous work Broadway Boogie Woogie which shows a modification
of his acetic vision, yet still retains his highly disciplined style of;
primary colors and vertical and horizontal bands. In response to the beat
of jazz, the pulsations of neon signs and the fast city pace, the painting's
rhythms are stepped up by increasing the number of small rectangular forms
and color blocks.
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Piet
Mondrian
Opposition
of Lines: Red and Yellow
Piet
Mondrian
Blue
Rose
Piet
Mondrian
Composition
with Color Areas
Piet
Mondrian
Composition
No. 2
Piet
Mondrian
Composition
with Red Blue Yellow
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