 |
| Piet Mondriaan by Arnold Newman 1942 |
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) pioneered abstract painting in Amsterdam in the early 20th century. Breaking from standards of figurative realism, he began using the modernist building blocks of pure form and colour to depict the world around him. While his early landscapes appear traditional, by 1905 he had started using trees and horizon lines to emphasize background colours and to structure the spaces in his compositions.
Mondrian devoted himself to devising an art of “universal beauty” grounded in what he termed “pure plastic art,” and alongside Theo van Doesburg, he founded the Dutch art movement known as De Stijl or Neoplasticism in 1917. His new paintings treated colour itself as modifiable material, so that looking at them might be a unique experience of considering movement and organisation. By restricting himself to primary colours (red, blue, and yellow), primary values (black, white, and grey), and primary directions (horizontal and vertical), Mondrian created what he believed was a precise method toward beauty. He played with various combinations of these factors in his Compositions, decreasing the number of coloured segments and darkening and widening his dividing lines.
Upon his arrival in New York City in 1940, Mondrian began revisiting his long-held practice of moving coloured rectangles of paper around his studio, and his typical black compositional lines started to incorporate the primary colours. Blue and yellow jostle freely in these paintings that appear like maps, or indeed scores for city life—but this new period of experimentation was cut short by his death in 1944.
Part 3 of a 4-part series on the works of Piet Mondrian:
 |
| 1914 Tableau no. 2 / Composition no. V oil on canvas 54.8 x 85.3 cm MoMA, New York |
 |
| 1914 Study, Plus and Minus charcoal 49.5 x 44.5 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA |
 |
| 1914 Scaffolding 2, Paris graphite on paper 21.9 x 14.6 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA |
 |
| 1914 Ocean 5 charcoal and gouache on wood-pulp wove paper, glued to Homosote panel 87.6 x 120.3 cm Guggenheim Museum, New York |
 |
| 1914 Composition oil on canvas 120.6 x 101.3 cm Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX |
1914 Composition in Oval with Colour Planes 1
The geometry of this composition, made two years after Mondrian moved from Holland to Paris, is directly based on sketches of partially demolished buildings, with exposed floors, chimneys, and patches of wallpaper. Mondrian believed that horizontal and vertical lines, such as those he used here, expressed an underlying, universal order.
MoMA, New York
 |
| 1914 Composition in Oval with Colour Planes 1 oil on canvas 107.6 x 78.8 cm MoMA, New York |
 |
| 1914 Composition 8 oil on canvas 94.6 x 5.9 cm Guggenheim Museum, New York |
 |
| c1914 Church Façade charcoal, with erasing, on off-white laid paper 63.3 x 48.3 cm Art Institute of Chicago, IL |
 |
| 1915 Ocean 5 charcoal and gouache on paper 87.6 x 120.3 cm Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice |
 |
| 1915 (dated 1912) Church Facade 6 charcoal on paper 99 x 63.4 cm MoMA, New York |
 |
| 1915 Composition 10 in Black and White oil on canvas 85.8 x 108.4 cm Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands |
 |
| c1916 Farm near Duivendrecht oil on canvas 86.3 x 107.9 cm Art Institute of Chicago, IL |
 |
| 1916 Farm Near Duivendrecht, in the Evening oil on canvas 80 x 106 cm Dallas Museum of Art, TX |
 |
| 1916 Farm at Duivendrecht, in the Evening oil on canvas 85 x 100 cm Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands |
 |
| 1916 Composition oil on canvas, with wood 120 x 75.6 cm Guggenheim Museum, New York |
 |
| 1917 Composition in Colour A oil on canvas 50.3 x 45.3 cm Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands |
 |
| 1917 Composition in Colour B oil on canvas 50.5 x 45 cm Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands |
 |
| 1917 Composition in Line, Second State oil on canvas 108 x 108 cm Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands |
 |
| 1917 Composition with colour field oil on canvas 48 x 60.5 cm Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
 |
| 1917 Composition with Colour Planes 5 oil on canvas 49 x 61.2 cm MoMA, New York |
 |
| 1917 Composition with Colour Planes oil on canvas 48 x 61 cm Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands |
 |
| 1918 Composition with Grid No.1 oil on canvas 80 .2 x 49.8 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX |
 |
| 1918 Composition with Grid No.2 oil on canvas (details not Found) |
 |
| 1919 Composition with Grid 5: Lozenge, Composition with Colours oil on canvas 63 x 63 cm Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands |
 |
| 1919 Composition with Grid 6: Lozenge, Composition with Colours oil on canvas 49 x 49 cm Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands |
 |
| 1919-20 Large Composition A oil on canvas 91 x 91 cm National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome |
 |
| 1919-20 Large Composition A oil on canvas 91 x 91 cm National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome |
 |
| 1920-25 A Chrysanthemum transparent and opaque watercolour over graphite 25.7 x 22.2 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA |
 |
| 1920 No. VI / Composition No.II oil on canvas 99.7 x 100.3 cm Tate Gallery, London |
 |
| 1920 Composition C oil on canvas 60.3 x 61 cm MoMA, New York |
 |
| 1921 Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Grey oil on canvas 60 x 60 cm Art Institute of Chicago, IL |
 |
| 1921 Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Grey oil on canvas 76 x 52.4 cm MoMA, New York |
 |
| 1921 Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow, and Grey oil on canvas 62.5 x 52 cm Dallas Museum of Art, TX |
 |
| 1922 Tableau 2 oil on canvas 55.6 x 53.3 cm Guggenheim Museum, New York |
 |
| 1922 Composition in red, yellow and blue oil on canvas 40 x 50.5 cm Musée D'Orsay, Paris |
 |
| 1923-24 Colour lithograph on wove paper, with stamp 49.1 x 65.2 cm Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands |
 |
| 1924 Chrysanthemum in a glass watercolour / gouache 23.5 x 20 cm Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
