Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, March 15, 2021: Piet Mondrian, a Dutch painter and art theoretician (#1231)

Piet Mondrian, born Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (1872 –1944), was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the great artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements

Piet Mondrian studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, from 1892 to 1897. Until 1908, when he began to take annual trips to Domburg in Zeeland, Mondrian’s work was naturalistic—incorporating successive on influences of academic landscape and still-life painting, Dutch Impressionism, and Symbolism. In 1909 a major exhibition of his work (with that of Jan Sluijters and Cornelis Spoor) was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and that same year he joined the Theosophic Society. In 1909 and 1910 he experimented with Pointillism and by 1911 had begun to work in a Cubist mode. After seeing original Cubist works by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso at the first Moderne Kunstkring exhibition in 1911 in Amsterdam, Mondrian decided to move to Paris. There, from 1912 to 1914, he began to develop an independent abstract style.

Mondrian was visiting the Netherlands when World War I broke out and prevented his return to Paris. During the war years in Holland, he further reduced his colors and geometric shapes and formulated his nonobjective Neoplastic style. In 1917 Mondrian became one of the founders of De Stijl. This group, which included Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck, and Georges Vantongerloo, extended its principles of abstraction and simplification beyond painting and sculpture to architecture and graphic and industrial design. Mondrian’s essays on abstract art were published in the periodical De Stijl. In July 1919 he returned to Paris; there he exhibited with De Stijl in 1923, but withdrew from the group after van Doesburg reintroduced diagonal elements into his work around 1925. In 1930, Mondrian showed with Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) and in 1931 joined Abstraction-Création.

World War II forced Mondrian to move to London in 1938 and then to settle in New York in October 1940. In New York he joined American Abstract Artists and continued to publish texts on Neoplasticism. His late style evolved significantly in response to the city. In 1942 his first solo show took place at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery, New York.

In 1926, Katherine Dreier, co-founder of New York City's Society of Independent Artists (along with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray), visited Piet Mondrian's studio in Paris and acquired one of his diamond compositions, Painting I. This was then shown during an exhibition organized by the Society of Independent Artists in the Brooklyn Museum - the first major exhibition of modern art in America since the Armory Show. Dreier stated in the catalog that "Holland has produced three great painters who, though a logical expression of their own country, rose above it through the vigor of their personality - the first was Rembrandt, the second was Van Gogh, and the third is Mondrian."

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