Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, , ), was a Dutch
painter and
art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He was one of the pioneers of 20th-century
abstract art
Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a Composition (visual arts), composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. ''Abstract art'', ''non-figurative art'', ''non- ...
, 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.
Mondrian's art was highly
utopian and was concerned with a search for universal values and aesthetics. He proclaimed in 1914: "Art is higher than
reality
Reality is the sum or aggregate of everything in existence; everything that is not imagination, imaginary. Different Culture, cultures and Academic discipline, academic disciplines conceptualize it in various ways.
Philosophical questions abo ...
and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the
spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man."
He was a contributor to the ''
De Stijl
De Stijl (, ; 'The Style') was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 by a group of artists and architects based in Leiden (Theo van Doesburg, Jacobus Oud, J.J.P. Oud), Voorburg (Vilmos Huszár, Jan Wils) and Laren, North Holland, Laren (Piet Mo ...
'' art movement and group, which he co-founded with
Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a
non-representational form which he termed ''
Neoplasticism''. This was the new 'pure plastic art' which he believed was necessary in order to create 'universal beauty'. To express this, Mondrian eventually decided to limit his formal vocabulary to the three
primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), the three primary values (black, white, and gray), and the two primary directions (horizontal and vertical). Mondrian's arrival in Paris from the Netherlands in 1912 marked the beginning of a period of profound change. He encountered experiments in
Cubism and with the intent of integrating himself within the Parisian avant-garde removed an 'a' from the Dutch spelling of his name (Mondriaan).
Mondrian's work had an enormous influence on
20th-century art, influencing not only the course of abstract painting and numerous major styles and art movements (e.g.
Color Field painting,
Abstract Expressionism and
Minimalism), but also fields outside the domain of painting, such as
design
A design is the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word ''design'' refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something ...
,
architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructi ...
and
fashion. Design historian
Stephen Bayley said: "Mondrian has come to mean
Modernism
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
. His name and his work sum up the High Modernist ideal. I don't like the word 'iconic', so let's say that he's become totemic – a totem for everything Modernism set out to be."
Life
Netherlands (1872–1911)

Mondrian was born in
Amersfoort
Amersfoort () is a Cities of the Netherlands, city and List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of Utrecht (province), Utrecht, Netherlands. As of 31 January 2023, the municipality had ...
, province of
Utrecht
Utrecht ( ; ; ) is the List of cities in the Netherlands by province, fourth-largest city of the Netherlands, as well as the capital and the most populous city of the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of Utrecht (province), Utrecht. The ...
in the Netherlands, the second of his parents' children. He was descended from Christian Dirkzoon Monderyan who lived in
The Hague
The Hague ( ) is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. With a population of over half a million, it is the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Situated on the west coast facing the North Sea, The Hague is the c ...
as early as 1670.
[Michel Seuphor, ''Piet Mondrian: Life and Work'' (New York: Harry N. Abrams), pp. 44 and 407.] The family moved to
Winterswijk
Winterswijk (; also known as ''Winterswiek'' or ''Wenters'') is a Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality and a town in the eastern Netherlands. It has a population of and is situated in the Achterhoek, which lies in the easternmost part ...
when his father, Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan, was appointed head teacher at a local primary school. Mondrian was introduced to art from an early age. His father was a qualified drawing teacher, and, with his uncle, Frits Mondriaan (a pupil of
Willem Maris of the
Hague School of artists), the younger Piet often painted and drew along the river Gein.
After a strict
Protestant
Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that emphasizes Justification (theology), justification of sinners Sola fide, through faith alone, the teaching that Salvation in Christianity, salvation comes by unmerited Grace in Christianity, divin ...
upbringing, in 1892, Mondrian entered the
Academy for Fine Art in
Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...
. He was already qualified as a teacher. He began his career as a teacher in
primary education
Primary education is the first stage of Education, formal education, coming after preschool/kindergarten and before secondary education. Primary education takes place in ''primary schools'', ''elementary schools'', or first schools and middle s ...
, but he also practiced
painting
Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...
. Most of his work from this period is
naturalistic or
Impressionistic, consisting largely of
landscape
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or human-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes th ...
s. These
pastoral
The pastoral genre of literature, art, or music depicts an idealised form of the shepherd's lifestyle – herding livestock around open areas of land according to the seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. The target au ...
images of his native country depict
windmills, fields, and rivers, initially in the Dutch Impressionist manner of the Hague School and then in a variety of styles and techniques that attest to his search for a personal style. These paintings are
representational, and they illustrate the influence that various artistic movements had on Mondrian, including
pointillism and the vivid colors of
Fauvism. In 1893 he had his first exhibition.

On display in the
Kunstmuseum Den Haag are a number of paintings from this period, including such
Post-Impressionist works as ''The Red Mill'' and ''Trees in Moonrise''. Another painting, ''Evening'' (''Avond'') (1908), depicting a tree in a field at dusk, even augurs future developments by using a palette consisting almost entirely of red, yellow, and blue. Although ''Avond'' is only limitedly
abstract, it is the earliest Mondrian painting to emphasize
primary colors.
Mondrian's earliest paintings showing a degree of abstraction are a series of canvases from 1905 to 1908 that depict dim scenes of indistinct trees and houses reflected in still water. Although the result leads the viewer to begin focusing on the forms over the content, these paintings are still firmly rooted in nature, and it is only the knowledge of Mondrian's later achievements that leads one to search in these works for the roots of his future abstraction.
Mondrian's art was intimately related to his
spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908, he became interested in the
theosophical movement launched by
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the late 19th century, and in 1909 he joined the Dutch branch of the
Theosophical Society. The work of Blavatsky and a parallel spiritual movement,
Rudolf Steiner's
Anthroposophy, significantly affected the further development of his aesthetic. Blavatsky believed that it was possible to attain a more profound knowledge of nature than that provided by
empirical
Empirical evidence is evidence obtained through sense experience or experimental procedure. It is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law.
There is no general agreement on how t ...
means, and much of Mondrian's work for the rest of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge. In 1918, he wrote "I got everything from the Secret Doctrine", referring to a book written by Blavatsky. In 1921, in a letter to Steiner, Mondrian argued that his neoplasticism was "the art of the foreseeable future for all true Anthroposophists and Theosophists". He remained a committed Theosophist in subsequent years, although he also believed that his own artistic current, neoplasticism, would eventually become part of a larger, ecumenical spirituality.
Mondrian and his later work were deeply influenced by the 1911 ''
Moderne Kunstkring'' exhibition of
Cubism in
Amsterdam
Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...
. His search for simplification is shown in two versions of ''Still Life with Ginger Pot'' (''Stilleven met Gemberpot''). The 1911 version, is Cubist; in the 1912 version, the objects are reduced to a round shape with
triangle
A triangle is a polygon with three corners and three sides, one of the basic shapes in geometry. The corners, also called ''vertices'', are zero-dimensional points while the sides connecting them, also called ''edges'', are one-dimension ...
s and
rectangle
In Euclidean geometry, Euclidean plane geometry, a rectangle is a Rectilinear polygon, rectilinear convex polygon or a quadrilateral with four right angles. It can also be defined as: an equiangular quadrilateral, since equiangular means that a ...
s.
Paris (1912–1914)
In 1912, Mondrian moved to Paris and changed his name, dropping an "a" from "Mondriaan", to emphasize his departure from the Netherlands, and his integration within the Parisian
avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
.
While in Paris, the influence of the Cubist style of
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, Ceramic art, ceramicist, and Scenic ...
and
Georges Braque appeared almost immediately in Mondrian's work. Paintings such as ''The Sea'' (1912) and his various studies of trees from that year still contain a measure of representation, but, increasingly, they are dominated by geometric shapes and interlocking planes. While Mondrian was eager to absorb the Cubist influence into his work, it seems clear that he saw Cubism as a "port of call" on his artistic journey, rather than as a destination. Piet Mondrian's Cubist period lasted from 1912 to 1917.
Netherlands (1914–1918)
Unlike the Cubists, Mondrian still attempted to reconcile his painting with his spiritual pursuits, and in 1913 he began to fuse his art and his theosophical studies into a theory that signaled his final break from representational painting. While Mondrian was visiting the Netherlands in 1914,
World War I
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
began, forcing him to remain there for the duration of the conflict. During this period, he stayed at the
Laren artists' colony, where he met
Bart van der Leck and
Theo van Doesburg, who were both undergoing their own personal journeys toward abstraction. Van der Leck's use of only primary colors in his art greatly influenced Mondrian. After a meeting with Van der Leck in 1916, Mondrian wrote, "My technique which was more or less Cubist, and therefore more or less pictorial, came under the influence of his precise method." With Van Doesburg, Mondrian founded ''
De Stijl
De Stijl (, ; 'The Style') was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 by a group of artists and architects based in Leiden (Theo van Doesburg, Jacobus Oud, J.J.P. Oud), Voorburg (Vilmos Huszár, Jan Wils) and Laren, North Holland, Laren (Piet Mo ...
'' (''The Style''), a journal of the
De Stijl Group, in which he first published essays defining his theory, which he called neoplasticism.
Mondrian published "''De Nieuwe Beelding in de schilderkunst''" ("The New Visualisation in Painting"), in twelve installments during 1917 and 1918. This was his first major attempt to express his artistic theory in writing. Mondrian's best and most-often quoted expression of this theory, however, comes from a letter he wrote to
H. P. Bremmer in 1914:
Over the next two decades, Mondrian methodically developed his signature style embracing the Classical, Platonic, Euclidean worldview where he simply focused on his, now iconic, horizontal and vertical black lines forming squares and rectangles filled with primary hues.
Paris (1918–1938)
When World War I ended in 1918, Mondrian returned to
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...
, where he would remain until 1938. Immersed in post-war Paris culture of artistic innovation, he flourished and fully embraced the art of pure abstraction for the rest of his life. Mondrian began producing grid-based paintings in late 1919, and in 1920, the style for which he came to be renowned began to appear.
Mondrian believed that "pure abstract art becomes completely emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances. It is no longer natural harmony but creates equivalent relationships. The realization of equivalent relationships is of the highest importance for life.
In the early paintings of this style, the lines delineating the rectangular forms are relatively thin, and they are gray, not black. The lines also tend to fade as they approach the edge of the painting, rather than stopping abruptly. The forms themselves, smaller and more numerous than in later paintings, are filled with primary colors, black, or gray, and nearly all of them are colored; only a few are left white.
During late 1920 and 1921, Mondrian's paintings arrive at what is to casual observers their definitive and mature form. Thick black lines now separate the forms, which are larger and fewer in number, and more of the forms are left white. This was not the culmination of his artistic evolution, however. Although the refinements became subtler, Mondrian's work continued to evolve during his years in Paris.
In the 1921 paintings, many, though not all, of the black lines stop short at a seemingly arbitrary distance from the edge of the canvas, although the divisions between the rectangular forms remain intact. Here, too, the rectangular forms remain mostly colored. As the years passed and Mondrian's work evolved further, he began extending all of the lines to the edges of the canvas, and he began to use fewer and fewer colored forms, favoring white instead.
These tendencies are particularly obvious in the "lozenge" works that Mondrian began producing with regularity in the mid-1920s. The "lozenge" paintings are square canvases tilted 45 degrees, so that they have a diamond shape. Typical of these is ''Schilderij No. 1: Lozenge With Two Lines and Blue'' (1926). One of the most minimal of Mondrian's canvases, this painting consists only of two black, perpendicular lines and a small blue triangular form. The lines extend all the way to the edges of the canvas, almost giving the impression that the painting is a fragment of a larger work.
Although one's view of the painting is hampered by the glass protecting it, and by the toll that age and handling have obviously taken on the canvas, a close examination of this painting begins to reveal something of the artist's method. The painting is not composed of perfectly flat planes of color, as one might expect. Subtle brush strokes are evident throughout. The artist appears to have used different techniques for the various elements. The black lines are the flattest elements, with the least depth. The colored forms have the most obvious brush strokes, all running in one direction. Most interesting, however, are the white forms, which clearly have been painted in layers, using brush strokes running in different directions. This generates a greater sense of depth in the white forms so that they appear to overwhelm the lines and the colors, which indeed they were doing, as Mondrian's paintings of this period came to be increasingly dominated by white space.
In 1926,
Katherine Dreier, co-founder of New York City's
Society of Independent Artists (along with
Marcel Duchamp and
Man Ray
Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky; August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American naturalized French visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealism, Surrealist movements, ...
), 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 Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heig ...
– the first major exhibition of modern art in America since the
Armory Show. She 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
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (; ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), mononymously known as Rembrandt was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and Drawing, draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in ...
, the second was
Van Gogh, and the third is Mondrian."
As the years progressed, lines began to take precedence over forms in Mondrian's paintings. In the 1930s, he began to use thinner lines and double lines more frequently, punctuated with a few small colored forms, if any at all. Double lines particularly excited Mondrian, for he believed they offered his paintings a new dynamism which he was eager to explore. The introduction of the double line in his work was influenced by the work of his friend and contemporary
Marlow Moss.
From 1934 to 1935, three of Mondrian's paintings were exhibited as part of the "Abstract and Concrete" exhibitions in the UK at Oxford, London, and
Liverpool
Liverpool is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. It is situated on the eastern side of the River Mersey, Mersey Estuary, near the Irish Sea, north-west of London. With a population ...
.
London and New York (1938–1944)
In September 1938, Mondrian left Paris in the face of advancing
fascism
Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hie ...
and moved to London. After the Netherlands was invaded and Paris fell in 1940, he left London for
Manhattan
Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
in New York City, where he would remain until his death. Some of Mondrian's later works are difficult to place in terms of his artistic development because there were quite a few canvases that he began in Paris or London and only completed months or years later in Manhattan. The finished works from this later period are visually busy, with more lines than any of his work since the 1920s, placed in an overlapping arrangement that is almost cartographical in appearance. He spent many long hours painting on his own until his hands blistered, and he sometimes cried or made himself sick.
Mondrian produced ''Lozenge Composition With Four Yellow Lines'' (1933), a simple painting that innovated thick, colored lines instead of black ones. After that one painting, this practice remained dormant in Mondrian's work until he arrived in Manhattan, at which time he began to embrace it with abandon. In some examples of this new direction, such as ''Composition'' (1938) / ''Place de la Concorde'' (1943), he appears to have taken unfinished black-line paintings from Paris and completed them in New York by adding short perpendicular lines of different colors, running between the longer black lines, or from a black line to the edge of the canvas. The newly colored areas are thick, almost bridging the gap between lines and forms, and it is startling to see color in a Mondrian painting that is unbounded by black. Other works mix long lines of red amidst the familiar black lines, creating a new sense of depth by the addition of a colored layer on top of the black one. His painting ''Composition No. 10'', 1939–1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black grid lines clearly defined Mondrian's radical but classical approach to the rectangle.
On 23 September 1940 Mondrian left Europe for New York aboard the Cunard White Star Line ship , departing from Liverpool. ''
Composition Number 12'', started in 1936 in Paris, was carried to Mondrian when he emigrated to New York, where he completed the painting in 1942 - one of Mondrian's so called 'transatlantic paintings'. It now hangs in
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It is located in the southern Ontario, southern portion of the province of Ontario, at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the cor ...
, in the
National Gallery of Canada
The National Gallery of Canada (), located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's National museums of Canada, national art museum. The museum's building takes up , with of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the List of large ...
.
The new canvases that Mondrian began in Manhattan are even more startling, and indicate the beginning of a new idiom that was cut short by the artist's death. ''
New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
'' (1942) is a complex lattice of red, blue, and yellow lines, occasionally interlacing to create a greater sense of depth than his previous works. An unfinished 1941 version of this work, titled ''New York City I'', uses strips of painted paper tape, which the artist could rearrange at will to experiment with different designs. In October 2022 it was revealed that the work, which was first displayed at the
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
(MoMA) in New York in 1945, had been displayed upside down, since at least 1980, at the
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany, where it is now held. The gallery explained that it would continue to display it the wrong way up to avoid damaging it.
His painting ''
Broadway Boogie-Woogie'' (1942–43) at the Museum of Modern Art was highly influential in the school of
abstract geometric painting. The piece is made up of a number of shimmering squares of bright color that leap from the canvas, then appear to shimmer, drawing the viewer into those neon lights. In this painting and the unfinished ''
Victory Boogie Woogie'' (1942–1944), Mondrian replaced former solid lines with lines created from small adjoining rectangles of color, created in part by using small pieces of paper tape in various colors. Larger unbounded rectangles of color punctuate the design, some with smaller concentric rectangles inside them. While Mondrian's works of the 1920s and 1930s tend to have an almost scientific austerity about them, these are bright, lively paintings, reflecting the upbeat music that inspired them and the city in which they were made.
In these final works, the forms have indeed usurped the role of the lines, opening another new door for Mondrian's development as an abstractionist. The ''Boogie-Woogie'' paintings were clearly more of a revolutionary change than an evolutionary one, representing the most profound development in Mondrian's work since his abandonment of representational art in 1913.
In 2008 the Dutch television program ''
Andere Tijden'' found the only known movie footage with Mondrian. The discovery of the film footage was announced at the end of a two-year research program on the ''Victory Boogie Woogie''. The research found that the painting was in very good condition and that Mondrian painted the composition in one session. It also was found that the composition was changed radically by Mondrian shortly before his death by using small pieces of colored tape.
Wall works
When the 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left the
Netherlands
, Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of
neoplasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London's Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan.
At the age of 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final Manhattan studio at 15 East
59th Street, and set about to recreate the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, h ...
from well-traveled records. Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had inhabited. He was there for only a few months, as he died in February 1944.
After his death, Mondrian's friend and sponsor in Manhattan, artist
Harry Holtzman, and another painter friend,
Fritz Glarner, carefully documented the studio on film and in still photographs before opening it to the public for a six-week exhibition. Before dismantling the studio, Holtzman (who was also Mondrian's heir) traced the wall compositions precisely, prepared exact portable facsimiles of the space each had occupied, and affixed to each the original surviving cut-out components. These portable Mondrian compositions have become known as "The Wall Works". Since Mondrian's death, they have been exhibited twice at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (1983 and 1995–96), once in
SoHo
SoHo, short for "South of Houston Street, Houston Street", is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, art installations such as The Wall ...
at the Carpenter + Hochman Gallery (1984), once each at the Galerie Tokoro in Tokyo, Japan (1993), the XXII Biennial of
São Paulo
São Paulo (; ; Portuguese for 'Paul the Apostle, Saint Paul') is the capital of the São Paulo (state), state of São Paulo, as well as the List of cities in Brazil by population, most populous city in Brazil, the List of largest cities in the ...
(1994), the
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...
(1995), and – the first time shown in Europe – at the
Akademie der Künste (Academy of The Arts), in Berlin (22 February – 22 April 2007). His work was also shown in a retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which ran from August – September 1955.
Mondrian's flowers
While Mondrian's theories of abstraction have been his enduring legacy, he was also a painter of flowers. He began to paint flowers at the turn of the century, creating portraits of individual blooms that blended his strict artistic training and powers of observation to his spiritual and romantic yearnings.
Mondrian continued to paint flowers in a secretive manner into the 1920s, claiming to friends that he did so for commercial reasons alone.
The flower paintings were created under the taboo that was cast upon traditional genre and representational painting by an entire age swept up by the triumph of abstraction. Nevertheless, the Mondrian flowers contribute to a broader view of the life and work of Mondrian – a view that diverges sharply from the traditional reading of his artistic evolution.
Personality
In a review of a 2024 biography of Mondrian, ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' book critic
Dwight Garner described him as a "deeply eccentric man" who "lived like an ambassador from the kingdom of ridiculous notions" and who "had no sense of humor and rarely smiled".
He was a follower of
phrenology and
spiritualism and fad diets and "didn’t believe in ice cubes because cold food was bad for the health".
[
According to Nick Weber, author of a 2018 biography of Mondrian, the artist was so deeply afraid of eye injuries that he refused to play with his brothers as a child. He was also afraid of spiders. He once fell asleep during a concert and started screaming loudly when he woke up and spotted a spider. He never married, never had any long-lasting relationships and always ate alone.
Nicholas Fox Weber, in his 2025 biography, notes the contradictions, for on one hand “he (Mondrian) lived alone, survived largely on lentils and coffee, built his own furniture out of fruit crates and avoided romantic relationships on the grounds that they obstructed his work and led to obligations.” That contrasts with “the myths about Mondrian is that he was a recluse, uninterested in any scene. In fact, though he squirrelled himself away during working hours ... in the evenings it was a different story. His favourite thing to do, from his days in Amsterdam onwards, was to go out dancing. He was a regular at the glitzy Hotel Hamdorff in Laren, where he danced waltzes and tangos ‘very slowly’, keeping his body almost totally rigid. In Paris, he discovered jazz and the Charleston and took women friends to the Jungle Bar and Le Petit Teddy ... In 1939, living in North London, he would stroll down to Camden Town to dance at the Camden Palace or the Bedford. The year before his seventieth birthday, he marked his ‘emergence from a long bout of rheumatism’ with a wild night out at Café Society in New York.”
]
Death and legacy
Mondrian died of pneumonia on 1 February 1944 and was interred at the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Queens
Queens is the largest by area of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. Located near the western end of Long Island, it is bordered by the ...
, New York.
On 3 February 1944, a memorial was held for Mondrian at the Universal Chapel on Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street in Manhattan
Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
. The service was attended by nearly 200 people including Alexander Archipenko
Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko (February 25, 1964) was a Ukrainian-American avant-garde artist, sculpture, sculptor, and graphic designer, graphic artist, active in France and the United States. He was one of the first to apply the principles o ...
, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder and Robert Motherwell.
The Mondrian / Holtzman Trust functions as Mondrian's official estate, and "aims to promote awareness of Mondrian's artwork and to ensure the integrity of his work".
Mondrian was described by critic Robert Hughes, in his 1980 book ''The Shock of the New'', as "one of the supreme artists of the 20th century." Likewise in his television documentaries of '' The Shock of the New'', Hughes referred to Mondrian considered again as "one of the greatest artists of the 20th century (...) who was one of the last painters who believed that the conditions of human life could be changed by making pictures". Dutch art historian Carel Blotkamp, an authority on De Stijl
De Stijl (, ; 'The Style') was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 by a group of artists and architects based in Leiden (Theo van Doesburg, Jacobus Oud, J.J.P. Oud), Voorburg (Vilmos Huszár, Jan Wils) and Laren, North Holland, Laren (Piet Mo ...
, reaffirmed the same belief that he was "one of the great artists of the twentieth century".
In 2022, design historian Stephen Bayley wrote: "Mondrian has come to mean Modernism
Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
. His name and his work sum up the High Modernist ideal. I don't like the word 'iconic', so let's say that he's become totemic – a totem for everything Modernism set out to be."
On 14 November 2022, Mondrian's ''Composition No. II'' was sold at Sotheby's Auction for US $51 million, which beat a previous record of US $50.6 million for his work. ''Composition No. II'' features a 20-inch by 20-inch canvas with a large red square in the upper right corner, a small blue square in the bottom left corner, and a yellow block with all outlined by black.
Mondrian's ''Composition With Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue'' was sold for $47.6 million at a Christie's
Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie (auctioneer), James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, and it has additional salerooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, Geneva, Shan ...
auction in 2025.
Claims for Nazi looted art
In October 2020, Mondrian's heirs filed a lawsuit in a U.S. court against the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany, for the return of four paintings by Mondrian.
In December 2021, Mondrian's heirs sued the Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is an List of art museums#North America, art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at ...
for the return of Mondrian's ''Composition with Blue'' (1928), which had been seized by the Nazis and had passed through the art dealers Karl Buchholz and Curt Valentin before being gifted to the museum by Albert E. Gallatin.
References in culture
* The National Museum of Serbia was the first museum to include one of Mondrian's paintings in its permanent exhibition.
* Along with Klee and Kandinsky, Mondrian was one of the main inspirations to the early pointillist musical aesthetic of serialist composer Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 19255 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war contemporary classical music.
Born in Montb ...
, although his interest in Mondrian was restricted to the works of 1914–15. By May 1949 Boulez said he was "suspicious of Mondrian", and by December 1951 expressed a dislike for his paintings (regarding them as "the most denuded of mystery that have ever been in the world"), and a strong preference for Klee.
* In the 1930s, the French fashion designer Lola Prusac, who worked at that time for Hermès
Hermès International S.A. ( , ) is a French Luxury goods, luxury fashion house established in 1837. It specializes in leather goods, silk goods, lifestyle accessories, home furnishings, perfumery, jewelry, watches and ready-to-wear. Since the ...
in Paris, designed a range of luggage and bags inspired by the latest works of Mondrian: inlays of red, blue, and yellow leather squares.
* Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's Fall 1965 Mondrian collection featured shift dresses in blocks of primary color with black bordering, inspired by Mondrian. The collection proved so popular that it inspired a range of imitations that encompassed garments from coats to boots.
* The title sequence of the 1965–1971 American absurdist TV sitcom
A sitcom (short for situation comedy or situational comedy) is a genre of comedy produced for radio and television, that centers on a recurring cast of character (arts), characters as they navigate humorous situations within a consistent settin ...
'' Green Acres'' features actress Eva Gabor
Eva Gabor ( ; February 11, 1919 – July 4, 1995) was a Hungarian-American actress and socialite. Gabor voiced Duchess and Miss Bianca in the Disney animations ''The Aristocats'' (1970), ''The Rescuers'' (1977), and ''The Rescuers Down Under'' ...
singing her portion of the theme song in her New York penthouse apartment with a Mondrian painting hanging in the background.
* The 1970–1974 American television serial ''The Partridge Family
''The Partridge Family'' is an American musical sitcom created by Bernard Slade, which was broadcast in the United States from September 1970 to March 1974 on American Broadcasting Company, ABC. After the final first-run telecast on ABC in March ...
'' featured a musical family who purchase an (already-old at the time) 1957 Chevrolet Superior Coach Series 6800 school bus for use as their tour bus, and then repaint it in a colored geometric pattern heavily inspired by Mondrian's grid-based paintings. The reason for this choice of pattern is never discussed in the TV series.
* The La Vie Claire cycling team's bicycles and clothing designs were inspired by Mondrian's work throughout the 1980s. The French ski and bicycle equipment manufacturer Look, which also sponsored the team, used a Mondrian-inspired logo for a while. The style was revived in 2008 for a limited edition frame.
* 1980s R&B group Force MDs created a music video
A music video is a video that integrates a song or an album with imagery that is produced for promotion (marketing), promotional or musical artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a music marketing device intended to ...
for their hit "Love is a House", superimposing themselves performing inside of digitally drawn squares inspired by ''Composition II''.
* Piet is an esoteric programming language
An esoteric programming language (sometimes shortened to esolang) is a programming language designed to test the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, as software art, as a hacking interface to another language ...
named after Piet Mondrian in which programs look like abstract art.
* Mondrian is a software for interactive data visualization named after him.
* Mondrian is a functional scripting language
In computing, a script is a relatively short and simple set of instructions that typically automation, automate an otherwise manual process. The act of writing a script is called scripting. A scripting language or script language is a programming ...
designed by Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...
for the .NET
The .NET platform (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a free and open-source, managed code, managed computer software framework for Microsoft Windows, Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft emplo ...
platform.
* Mondrian is a web-based code review system written in Python and used within Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
.
* Mondrian is an open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
OLAP
In computing, online analytical processing (OLAP) (), is an approach to quickly answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries. The term ''OLAP'' was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term online transaction processi ...
(online analytical processing) server written in Java
Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...
.
* Mondrian is an extension of the Conformal Prediction machine learning framework.
* An episode of the BBC TV drama '' Hustle'' entitled "Picture Perfect" is about the team attempting to create and sell a Mondrian forgery. To do so, they must steal a real Mondrian ('' Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black'', 1921) from an art gallery.
*In 2001–2003 British artist Keith Milow made a series of paintings based on the so-called ''Transatlantic Paintings'' (1935–1940) by Mondrian.
* The Mondrian is a 20-story high-rise in the Cityplace neighborhood of Oak Lawn, Dallas, Texas
Dallas () is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of Texas metropolitan areas, most populous metropolitan area in Texas and the Metropolitan statistical area, fourth-most ...
, US. Construction started on the structure in 2003, and the building was completed in 2005.
* In 2008, Nike released a pair of Dunk Low SB shoes inspired by Mondrian's neo-plastic paintings.
* The front cover to Australian rock band Silverchair's fifth and final album ''Young Modern
''Young Modern'' is the fifth and final studio album by Australian alternative rock band Silverchair, released in Australia on 31 March 2007 and in the United States on 24 July 2007 and co-produced by Daniel Johns and Nick Launay. The tit ...
'' (2007) is a tribute to Piet Mondrian's ''Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow''.
* The cover art of American psychedelic pop indie rock band The Apples in Stereo
The Apples in Stereo are an American indie rock band associated with The Elephant 6 Recording Company, Elephant 6 Collective. The band is largely the project of lead vocalist/guitarist/producer Robert Schneider, who writes the majority of the ba ...
's second album, '' Tone Soul Evolution'' (1997), was inspired by Piet Mondrian.
* The mathematics book ''An Introduction to Sparse Stochastic Processes'' by M. Unser and P. Tafti uses a representation of a stochastic process
In probability theory and related fields, a stochastic () or random process is a mathematical object usually defined as a family of random variables in a probability space, where the index of the family often has the interpretation of time. Sto ...
called the Mondrian process for its cover, which is named because of its resemblance to Piet Mondrian artworks.
* The music video for English pop duo La Roux's song ''Bulletproof'' features visual elements inspired by Mondrian's paintings.
* The Hague
The Hague ( ) is the capital city of the South Holland province of the Netherlands. With a population of over half a million, it is the third-largest city in the Netherlands. Situated on the west coast facing the North Sea, The Hague is the c ...
City Council honored Mondrian by adorning walls of City Hall with reproductions of his works and describing it as "the largest Mondrian painting in the world." The event celebrated the 100th year of the Stijl movement which Mondrian helped to found.
* The Jersey Surf Drum & Bugle Corps performed a show based on Piet Mondrian in their 2018 production titled ondo mondrian
* In collaboration with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid
Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...
, Swatch created a watch called the "Red Shiny Line (SUOZ297)" which pays tribute to Mondrian's "New York City, 3". This was followed in 2022 by the watch "RED, BLUE AND WHITE, BY PIET MONDRIAN (SUOZ344)" which celebrates the painting ''Composition in Red, Blue and White II'' as part of a collaboration between Swatch and Centre Pompidou
The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...
.
*The building facades and design details of Chun Yeung Estate, a public housing estate in Fo Tan, Hong Kong
Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...
, was inspired by geometric elements from Mondrian's work according to the Housing Department's architectural project team.
* In 2022, Tecno, in Partnership with Museum of Fine Arts, released a Special Edition of their Camon 19 Pro smartphone, incorporating his paintings into its design.
* In 2024, a recreational math problem has been inspired by Mondrian's art.
Commemoration
From 6 June to 5 October 2014, the Tate Liverpool displayed the largest UK collection of Mondrian's works, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of his death. ''Mondrian and his Studios'' included a life-size reconstruction of his Paris studio. Charles Darwent, in ''The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'', wrote: "With its black floor and white walls hung with moveable panels of red, yellow and blue, the studio at Rue du Départ was not just a place for making Mondrians. It was a Mondrian – and a generator of Mondrians." He has been described as "the world's greatest abstract geometrist".
See also
* Fourth dimension in art
* List of refugees
* List of claims for restitution of Nazi-looted art
* Mondrian and Theosophy
Notes
References
* Apollonio, Umbro (1965). ''Piet Mondrian'', Milano: Fabri 1976.
* Bax, Marty (2001). ''Complete Mondrian''. Aldershot (Hampshire) and Burlington (Vermont): Lund Humphries. (cloth) (pbk).
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* Larousse and Co., Inc. (1976). Mondrian, Piet. In Dictionary of Painters (p. 285). New York: Larousse and Co., Inc.
* Hajdu, István (1987). ''Piet Mondrian''. Pantheon. Budapest: Corvina Kiadó. .
* Faerna, José María (ed.) (1997). ''Mondrian'' Great Modern Masters. New York: Cameo/ Abrams. .
*
*
* Gooding, Mel (2001). ''Abstract Art''. Movements in Modern Art. London: Tate Publishing; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. (Tate); (Cambridge, cloth); (Cambridge, pbk).
*
*
*
*
* Janssen, Hans (2008). ''Mondriaan in het Gemeentemuseum Den Haag''. he Hague Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.
* Locher, Hans (1994) ''Piet Mondrian: Colour, Structure, and Symbolism: An Essay''. Bern: Verlag Gachnang & Springer.
*
*
*
* Mondrian, Piet (1986). ''The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian'', edited by Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James. Documents of 20th-Century Art. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co. . Reprinted 1987, London: Thames and Hudson. . Reprinted 1993, New York: Da Capo Press. .
* Schapiro, Meyer (1995). ''Mondrian: On the Humanity of Abstract Painting''. New York: George Braziller. (cloth) (pbk).
*
*
*
*
* Welsh, Robert P., Joop J. Joosten, and Henk Scheepmaker (1998). ''Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné'', translated by Jacques Bosser. Blaricum: V+K Publishing/Inmerc.
*
Further reading
*
External links
*
Mondrian Trust
– the holder of reproduction rights to Mondrian's works
* Piet Mondrian Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
RKD and Kunstmuseum Den Haag website
– functions as a portal to information on the life and work of Mondrian
* Many sourced quotes of Piet Mondrian and biography-facts i
''De Stijl 1917–1931 – The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art'', by H. L. C. Jaffé.
J. M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956.
Piet Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings
at harvardartmuseums.org
Mondrian collection
at Guggenheim, New York
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mondrian, Pieter
1872 births
1944 deaths
Dutch abstract painters
De Stijl
Dutch expatriates in France
Dutch expatriates in the United States
Dutch male painters
People from Amersfoort
School of Paris
Burials at Cypress Hills Cemetery
Deaths from pneumonia in New York City
20th-century Dutch artists
19th-century Dutch painters
20th-century Dutch painters
Dutch Theosophists
Alumni of Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten