Piet Mondrian

De Steilj ,Neoplassticism and inspiration from Frank Lloyd

Wright

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan ,born in 1872 in Amersfoort, Netherlands and died in 1944 New York.

He studied painting for 4 years at the Rijksacademie (Royal Academy)

He is famous for his “Compositions” or non- representational paintings.and was thus an important proponent of the dutch artistic movement de steijl or neoplasticism .

He began his career as a figurative painter but in 1911 he met the Cubists in Paris and changed his mind about the construction of the work of art. After that he developed his poetry of the primary values or structural of the vision: line, plan, colour.

A timeline showing the evolution of Mondrian's style

At the beginning of his work as an artist, Mondrian painted in accordance with the tried and tested canons of naturalistic painting, otherwise known as realistic or figurative.During the naturalistic phase, the young artist painted a variety of still lifes, a great many landscapes, human figures and single flowers.

Naturalistic Period 1895 -1905

In the wake of the so-called Dutch luministic painting, as well as the work of Vincent Van Gogh and the Fauves painters, Mondrian begun around 1907 to use colors corresponding more to his inner vision rather than the more immediate appearance of things.

A cloud became red against a blue sky if this could better convey the strong contrast a man feels against the infinite space of the natural horizon. The landscapes are gradually stripped of trees, houses and any other sign of human presence, and seem designed to emphasize the endless space of nature.

Luminism and Modernist 1908-1911

The figure of a single tree which is another recurrent motif of this period in Mondrian's work. The artist sees a synthesis between the canvases in which the horizontal extension of the natural landscape (equivalent to the branches) predominates and those that represent a vertical architectural volume (equivalent to the trunk).

In his writings, years later, Mondrian would talk about the natural as identified by the horizontal and the spiritual by the vertical.The subsequent abstract compositions of horizontal and vertical lines are already present in the figure of a tree, albeit in a form still veiled by appearances.

For the Italian Futurist and the French Cubist painters the goal was a dynamic representation of the visible; for Mondrian Cubism was above all a key to detect a more permanent reality beyond the ever changing appearances of daily life.

Cubist influence 1912-1916

Pier and Ocean (1914) marks a definitive step in Mondrian's path toward pure abstraction. Here he has eliminated diagonal and curved lines as well as color; the only true reference to nature is found within the title and the horizontal lines that allude to the horizon and the verticals that evoke the pilings of the pier.

A contributor to de steij art movement

• Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and whiteWhile still in Holland during World War I, Mondrian helped found this group of artists and architects called De Stijl, and it was during this period he refined his style of abstraction even further. Composition with Color Planes shows his break with Analytic Cubism .Here, Mondrian has moved away from the Cubist palette of ochres, grays, and browns, opting instead for muted reds, yellows and blues - a clear precursor to his mature palette that focused on primary colors.That square proportion was to inform nearly all the works produced by Mondrian after 1916 .

Piet Mondrian, Broadway boogie woogie 1942

Frank Lloyd Wright, 'Kinder Symphony’, Illinois, 1912.

In 1942 the black lines were illuminated with yellow, red, and blue (X). As a result, the colored planes Mondrian had used in almost all the previous compositions disappeared.

In the Neoplastic compositions, planes express finite space and lines virtually infinite continuity. Previously reserved exclusively for planes, color was applied to line in 1942, at which point Mondrian found himself grappling with compositions in never-ending development.