Piet Mondrian - Part 4

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 emphasise 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 4 of a 4-part series on the works of Piet Mondrian:

c1924-25 Tableau No. IV: Lozenge Composition with Red, Grey, Blue, Yellow, and Black
oil on canvas 142.8 x 142.3 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

1926 Tableau I: Lozenge with Four Lines and Grey
oil on canvas 117.2 x 115.6 cm
MoMA, New York

1926 Composition with Blue
oil on canvas 61.1 x 61.1 cm
Philadelphia Art Museum, PA

1926 (design) 1964 reconstruction Stage model for 'L'Éphémère est éternel' (The Ephemeral is Eternal) by Michel Seuphor
painted wood 53.2 x 76.7 x 26.2 cm
Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands

1927 Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue
oil on canvas 40 x 52 cm
Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands

1928 Textual
lithograph 64 x 49.5 cm (sheet)
MoMA, New York

1929 Composition with Yellow, Blue, Black and Light Blue
oil on canvas 50.6 x 50.3 cm
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

1929 Composition
oil on canvas 45.1 x 45.3 cm
Guggenheim Museum, New York

1929 Composition No. I
oil on canvas 52 x 52 cm
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

1929 Composition No. II, with Red and Blue
oil on canvas 40.3 x 32.1 cm
MoMA, New York

1930 Fox Trot A
oil on canvas 78.2 x 78.3 cm
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

1930 Composition No. 1: Lozenge with Four Lines
oil on canvas 75.3 x 75.3 cm
Guggenheim Museum, New York

1930 Composition in white and black II
oil on canvas 50.5 x 50.5 cm
Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands

1931 Composition in Colours / Composition No. I with Red and Blue
oil on canvas 50 x 50 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

1932 Composition with Double Line and Yellow
oil on canvas (size not given)
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh

1935 Composition with Double Line and Blue (unfinished)
oil on canvas 82 x 72 cm
Mumok (Museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien) Vienna, Austria

1935 Composition B (No.II) with Red
oil on canvas 80.3 x 63.3 cm
Tate Gallery, London

1935 Composition (No. 1) Grey-Red
oil on canvas 57.5 x 55.6 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

c1935-36 Study for a Composition
charcoal on paper 27 x 21 cm
MoMA, New York

1936 Composition in White, Black, and Red
oil on canvas 102.2 x 104.1 cm
MoMA, New York

1936-42 Composition No. 12 with Blue
oil on canvas 62 x 60.3 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa

1937 Composition in Yellow, Blue, and White, I
oil on canvas 57.1 x 55.2 cm
MoMA, New York

1937-42 Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
oil on canvas 72.7 x 69.2 cm
Tate Gallery, London

1937-42 Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow

Mondrian completed this painting in 1942, soon after he moved to Manhattan from London. Just as the crisscrossing roads of Broadacre City disperse its inhabitants across the landscape, the gridded lines of Mondrian’s composition distribute blocks of primary colours across the canvas. This similarity may be more than mere coincidence. The rectilinear, machine-made forms of Wright’s architecture had influenced the formation of De Stijl, a Dutch design movement advocating abstraction in the arts that counted Mondrian as a founding member.

MoMA, New York

1937-42 Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
oil on canvas 72.7 x 69.2 cm
Tate Gallery, London

1937-42 Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow
oil on canvas 60.3 x 55.4 cm
MoMA, New York

1938 Composition in White, Red, and Yellow
oil on canvas 80 x 62.2 cm
Lose Angeles County Museum of Art, CA

1938-39 Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red 1938 / Composition with Red
oil on canvas, mounted on wood support 105.2 x 102.3 cm
Guggenheim Museum, New York

1938-43 Place de la Concorde
oil on canvas 94.6 x 94.6 cm
Dallas Museum of Art, TX

1939 Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: No. III
oil on canvas 44 x 83.3 cm
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA

1939-41 Composition with Red and Blue
oil on canvas 43.5 x 33 cm 

1939-43 Trafalgar Square

In September 1938 Mondrian moved from Paris to London to escape the threat of a German invasion. There he made Trafalgar Square, the first in a series of paintings titled after locations in cities that gave him refuge during World War II. The small, subtly textured planes of primary colors that seem to vibrate within their black perimeters are smaller and their arrangement more syncopated than in many of the artists earlier canvases: color segments expand across two rectangular fields in the larger black grid, and thickened blocks of black function as both line and plane (at lower right, for example). The date "39–43" inscribed on the original canvas stretcher suggests that Mondrian revisited this painting after his flight to New York in 1940 to escape the escalating war.

MoMA, New York

1939-43 Trafalgar Square
oil on canvas 145.2 x 120 cm
MoMA, New York

1939-42 Abstraction
oil on canvas 74.9 x 67.9 cm
Kimbell Art Musem, Fort Worth, TX

1940-41 Study for a Composition
collage of cut and pasted papers, prepared with gouache and charcoal, on pieced cream wove newsprint in three parts
33 x 27 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1941 New York City, 3 (unfinished)
oil, pencil, chalk and coloured tape on canvas 117 x 110 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

1942 Self-Portrait
pen, ink, charcoal and gouache on paper 62.2 x 45.7 cm
Dallas Museum of Art, TX

1942 Self-Portrait
ink over vine charcoal on paper 29.2 x 21.6 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

1942-43 Study for Broadway Boogie Woogie
graphite 19.1 x 19.1 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

1942-43 Broadway Boogie Woogie 

Mondrian arrived in New York in 1940, one of the many European artists who moved to the United States to escape World War II. He immediately fell in love with the city and with boogie-woogie music, to which he was introduced on his first evening in New York. Soon he began, as he said, to put a little boogie-woogie into his paintings.

Mondrian’s aesthetic doctrine of Neo-Plasticism restricted the painter to the most basic kinds of line—that is, to straight horizontals and verticals—and to a similarly limited color range, the primary triad of red, yellow, and blue plus white, black, and the grays in between. But Broadway Boogie Woogie omits black and breaks Mondrian’s once uniform bars of color into multicolored segments. Bouncing against each other, these tiny, blinking blocks of color create a vital and pulsing rhythm, an optical vibration that jumps from intersection to intersection like traffic on the streets of New York. At the same time, the picture is carefully calibrated, its colors interspersed with gray and white blocks.

MoMA, New York

1942-43 Broadway Boogie Woogie
oil on canvas 127 x 127 cm
MoMA, New York

1953 (original executed in 1921) Composition from Art of Today, Masters of Abstract Art, Album 1
One from a portfolio of sixteen screenprint reproductions
63.9 x 49 cm (sheet)
MoMA, New York