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MONDRIAN IN NEW YORK. By Barbara Rose. ALTHOUGH HE DID NOT ACTUALLY arrive in New York until 1940, the influence of Piet Mondrian began to be felt by American artists before the great pioneer abstractionist found himself in America, once again in flight from Hitler’s advancing armies. Even before Harry Holtzman persuaded his Dutch friend to ...
- MONDRIAN THE NEW YORKER
MONDRIAN THE NEW YORKER. By Joseph Masheck. MONDRIAN’S FIRST...
- MONDRIAN THE NEW YORKER
- Overview
- Early life and works
- Influence of Post-Impressionists and Luminists
Piet Mondrian, a painter, was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art, primarily through the Dutch art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”). His mature paintings use the simplest combinations of straight lines, right angles, primary colours, and black, white, and gray and possess an extreme formal purity.
What is Piet Mondrian famous for?
In 1917 Piet Mondrian cofounded the De Stijl movement, which rejected visually perceived reality as subject matter and restricted form to the most basic elements. Such works as Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (c. 1930) reflect this criteria. Mondrian’s late masterpieces, including Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), replaced black lines with coloured bands.
How was Piet Mondrian educated?
Mondrian began to study drawing at age 14, but, at the insistence of his family, he obtained a degree in education. Instead of looking for a teaching position, however, he took painting lessons and then moved to Amsterdam to register at the Rijksacademie, taking drawing lessons.
What was Piet Mondrian’s family like?
Pieter was the second child of Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Sr., who was an amateur draftsman and headmaster of a Calvinist primary school in Amersfoort. The boy grew up in a stable yet creative environment; his father was part of the Protestant orthodox circle that formed around the conservative Calvinist politician Abraham Kuyper, and his uncle, Frits Mondriaan, belonged to the Hague school of landscape painters. Both uncle and father gave him guidance and instruction when, at age 14, he began to study drawing.
Mondrian was determined to become a painter, but at the insistence of his family he first obtained a degree in education; by 1892 he was qualified to teach drawing in secondary schools. That same year, instead of looking for a teaching position, he took painting lessons from a painter in a small town not far from Winterswijk, where his family resided, and then moved to Amsterdam to register at the Rijksacademie. He became a member of the art society Kunstliefde (“Art Lovers”) in Utrecht, where his first paintings were exhibited in 1893, and in the following year he joined the two local artist societies in Amsterdam. During this period he continued to attend evening courses at the academy for drawing, impressing his professors with his self-discipline and effort. In 1897 he exhibited a second time.
Up to the turn of the century, Mondrian’s paintings followed the prevailing trends of art in the Netherlands: landscape and still-life subjects chosen from the meadows and polders around Amsterdam, which he depicted using subdued hues and picturesque lighting effects. In 1903 he visited a friend in Brabant (Belgium), where the calm beauty and clean lines of the landscape proved to be an important influence on him. When he stayed on in Brabant the following year, he experienced a period of personal and artistic discovery; by the time he returned to Amsterdam in 1905, his art had visibly changed. The landscapes he began to paint of the surroundings of Amsterdam, mainly of the Gein River, show a pronounced rhythmic framework and lean more toward compositional structure than toward the traditional picturesque values of light and shade. This vision of harmony and rhythm, achieved through line and colour, would develop toward abstraction in later years, but during this period his painting still remained more or less within the traditional boundaries of contemporary Dutch art.
Britannica Quiz
In 1907 Amsterdam sponsored the Quadrennial Exhibition, featuring such painters as Kees van Dongen, Otto van Rees, and Jan Sluijters, who were Post-Impressionists using pure colours in bold, nonliteral ways. Their work was strongly influenced by the forceful expression and use of colour in the art of Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh, whose work had been featured in a large exhibition in Amsterdam in 1905. Such daring use of colour was reflected in Mondrian’s Red Cloud, a rapidly executed sketch from 1907. By the time he painted Woods near Oele in 1908, new values began to appear in his work, including a linear movement that was somewhat reminiscent of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and a colour scheme—based on hues of yellow, orange, blue, violet, and red—that was suggestive of the palette of contemporary German Expressionist painters. With this vigorous painting of considerable size, Mondrian broke away from the national tradition of Dutch painting.
His new style was reinforced by his acquaintance with the Dutch artist Jan Toorop, who led the Dutch Luminist movement, an offshoot of French Neo-Impressionism. The Luminists, like the Neo-Impressionists, rendered light through a series of dots or short lines of primary colours. Mondrian concentrated on this use of colour and limited his palette to the primary hues: he proved his mastery of this evocation of strong, radiant sunshine in paintings such as Windmill in Sunlight (1908), executed mainly in yellow, red, and blue. But he moved beyond the tenets of the movement and expressed visual concerns that would remain constant in his oeuvre. In a painting such as The Red Tree, also dated from 1908, he expressed his own vision of nature by creating a balance between the contrasting hues of red and blue and between the violent movement of the tree and the blue sky, thus producing a sense of equilibrium, which would remain his prevailing aim in representing nature. In 1909 Mondrian’s Luminist works were exhibited in a large group show at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, which firmly established him as part of the Dutch avant-garde.
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Sep 23, 2017 · Mondrian had a manifestly European pedigree, yet only in New York did he have his richest realisation: that to continue, his Classicism needed radical reinvention. In October 1940, aged 68, he ...
Mar 5, 2021 · March 5, 2021 5:50pm. Public Domain. Inside his final studio, on East 59th street in New York, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian covered each wall with painted papers cut into crisp rectangles. Mondrian ...
- Tessa Solomon
MONDRIAN THE NEW YORKER. By Joseph Masheck. MONDRIAN’S FIRST NEW YORK PAINTING, New York, 1941–42, is part of a group of three city paintings belonging to the last part of his classic phase. The others are Place de la Concorde, 1 1938–43, and Trafalgar Square, 1939–43. It was appropriately De Stijl for Mondrian to be concerned with ...
- Joseph Masheck
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (Dutch: [ˈpitər kɔrˈneːlɪs ˈmɔndrijaːn]; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, US also , Dutch: [pit ˈmɔndrijɑn]), was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He was one of the pioneers of 20th-century ...
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Sep 26, 2022 · A delicious tale of modern art and a testament to Mondrian’s personal character transpired when, in 1943, he served as one of the jurors for a group show at Art of This Century, a New York ...
