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Piet Mondrian for kids
Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian are, to me, the twin groundbreakers of twentieth-century European pictorial art: Picasso the greatest painter who modernized picture-making, and Mondrian the greatest modernizer who painted. (They call to mind an earlier brace of revolutionaries from the southern and northern reaches of the continent: Giotto, in Italy, humanized medieval storytelling, and Jan van Eyck, in the Low Countries, revealed the novel capacities of oil paints with devout precision.) The case for Picasso makes itself, with the preternatural range of his formal and iconographic leaps—forward, backward, and sideways—in what painting could be made, or dared, to do. But style for him, from first to last, served a quest to manifest soul-deep spirituality as a demonstrable fact of life. His aim, he said, was not to create masterpieces, though he did that, too. It was “to find things out.” He reduced painting’s uses and procedures, the whats and the hows, to a rock-bottom why.
“Piet Mondrian: A Life” (Ridinghouse and Kunstmuseum Den Haag), by the late Hans Janssen—a former chief curator at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, with its matchless collection of the artist’s work—is the first thorough Mondrian biography since the nineteen-fifties to be published in English (translated, from the Dutch, by Sue McDonnell) and unlikely to be supplanted. It is audacious in structure. Janssen, who died last year, at the age of sixty-seven, drew on his profound knowledge to dispense with strict chronology and to write not only about his subject’s prodigious mind and eye but also from within them. He openly employs devices of fiction to parse intellectual insights and emotional states and, now and then, to cobble together imagined conversations between Mondrian and some of his significant contemporaries, with lines taken verbatim either from Mondrian’s own writings and letters or from the diaries, letters, or recollections of others, such as the American sculptor Alexander Calder. The Features correspondent A 1922 painting by Piet Mondrian challenged art history, defining a new era, writes Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as two exhibitions celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. Six lines and five colours was all it took to make a masterpiece. By 1922, the modernist mission appeared to be complete. In Piet Mondrian's Composition with Blue, Yellow, Red, Black and Grey, only primary colours prevail. The orange and cornflower blue that lingered the previous year had been banished from the grid, and a contemplative grey-white took centre stage. Western art had never seemed so simple or so accessible. In the same year, the Dutch painter took leave from his Paris studio to celebrate his 50th birthday with a retrospective of his work at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum. Today, a century later, Mondrian's 56 x 63cm Composition with Blue, Yellow, Red, Black and Grey is on permanent display in the museum's basement, the characteristic "PM" monogram and "22" still visible in scratchy red paint. Maurice Rummens, academic researcher at the Stedelijk Museum, describes the painting as "one of the spearheads" of the museum's collection. It signalled a transformation in Mondrian's style – and in painting. Representations of real objects and the use of perspective, seen in the artist's landscapes at the turn of the century and continuing into his cubist period, were no longer modern enough for him. Instead, he turned to pure abstraction to communicate something more ambitious and intangible: the elementary and universal qualities of the cosmos. "Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces," Mondrian later explained in a 1937 essay. "They exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes ' 11 September 2018 Conflicting sexual feelings about both men and women were an important factor in Piet Mondriaan’s life. The artist, whose abstract paintings are now worth hundreds of millions of euros, was uncertain about how to channel his erotic tendencies. Numerous biographies of Mondriaan’s life have been published since his death in 1944, and countless myths about his artistry have emerged. For example, some say he was a patronizing ascetic, while others claim he was a bon-vivant. American biographer Nick Weber is the first person to attempt to establish and interpret the true details of Mondriaan’s day-to-day life, without preconceived plans or ideas. Weber will defend his PhD thesis, written in the form of a biography entitled Piet Mondrian’s Early Years(1872-1919), at the University of Groningen on 20 September. Mondriaan grew up in a religious family in Amersfoort and Winterswijk. Even as a student at the State Academy of Fine Arts (Amsterdamse Rijksacademie), he stood out as a pioneer in the field of modernism, pushing back the traditional boundaries of colour and composition. In 1912, he left for Paris, where he created his own style of cubism. Arriving back in the Netherlands during World War I, he started painting in a more abstract style, befriended the artists responsible for De Stijl magazine and became an accomplished ballroom dancer. Mondriaan returned to Paris in 1919, never to return to the Netherlands. Nick Weber graduated from Yale and Loomis School in 1965 and is president of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in the USA. He became fascinated by Mondriaan’s abstract work at the tender age of ten. In the past, Weber has written biographical studies of Le Corbusier, Balthus and Freud. His PhD research at the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen was sup Piet Mondrian and the six lines that made a masterpiece
First ever biography about Piet Mondriaan’s early years
Mondriaan’s early years
Biographer Nick Weber