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Piet
Mondrian Biography
Piet
Mondrian (1872-1944)
Born in the Netherlands in 1872, Piet Mondrian attended the Amsterdam
Academy of Fine Art. He visited Paris in 1912 and returned to Amsterdam
in 1914 where he stayed during the First World War. In 1915 Mondrian
teamed up with Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck to form a movement
called De Stijl. He returned to Paris in 1919, working there until
1938 when the German Occupation forced him to move to London invited
by the painter Ben Nicholson, then finally to New York in 1940. In
New York, Mondrian met American painters and exhibited with the American
Abstract Artists Group. He died in 1944 and was buried in Brooklyn.
By 1908, Mondrian was using Fauve colors in landscape paintings, and
by the end of the decade he had embraced Cubism creating angular compositions
of trees. In 1921, Mondrian began using his signature pictorial language
which he termed neoplasticism - asymmetrical arrangements of rectangles
painted in primary colors divided by black bands on a white ground.
Mondrian was in search of transcendent experience and pure harmony
or equilibrium, and he saw his paintings as a model of a harmonious
world. In
New York Mondrian’s style changed. Influenced by modern architecture,
urban culture and jazz, the new paintings used bands of color broken
up by small squares of other color defining rectangular forms. Rather
than seeking equilibrium, as did the earlier paintings, these works
were lyrical and dynamic reflecting energy and movement Mondrian found
in New York City life.
To buy
Piet Mondrian prints framed click
the Framed Link or Mounted
Link.
