Piet Mondrian: How a Landscape Painter Ended Up With Grids

Mondrian's father, the head of a Calvinist school, was an amateur draftsman, and his uncle Frits belonged to the Hague school of landscape painters. Both taught him when he began drawing at 14.¹

Until about 1900 he painted what Dutch painters painted: meadows, polders and still lifes around Amsterdam, in quiet colors and picturesque light.¹ Then, around 1905, his landscapes of the Gein River began to show something new: a strong rhythmic framework, more structure than atmosphere.¹

An exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters in 1907, all influenced by Van Gogh, opened his eyes to pure color. Under the influence of the Dutch Luminists, he limited his palette to the primaries, painting works like Windmill in Sunlight (1908) mainly in yellow, red and blue.¹

In 1909 he joined the Theosophical Society, which believed in a harmonious cosmos uniting spirit and matter. From then on, his subjects were no longer things to depict, but parts of an overall harmony.¹

Watch the subject disappear. In The Red Tree, he balances red against blue, and the violent movement of the branches against the sky. In Gray Tree, the branches have become lines. A decade later, there is no tree at all.¹

In 1911 he saw the early Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, and early in 1912 he moved to Paris. He adopted the Cubists' muted palette of ochre, brown and gray, avoided curves and diagonals, and used more and more only vertical and horizontal lines. From 1913, his style moved toward total abstraction.¹

Visiting his ill father in 1914, he was stuck in the Netherlands by the First World War. In Laren he met the philosopher M. H. J. Schoenmaekers, whose ideas on the symbolic meaning of lines gave him a set of rules.¹

In 1917 Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Vilmos Huszár founded a journal and a movement: De Stijl, “The Style.” Its program: reject visible reality as a subject, and keep only the straight line, the primary colors, and black, white and gray.¹

Mondrian called his version neoplasticism. A painting no longer had to start from nature; it could be built from pure geometry and color, which he believed could express “a true vision of reality.”¹

Back in Paris from 1919, he refined his grids for almost twenty years. In 1938, with war approaching, he left for London; when the bombing started he fled again, in 1940, to New York.¹

The city changed him. Inspired by its pulse and by American music, he replaced his black lines with bands of color, then with lines of small colored rectangles. Broadway Boogie Woogie, shown in 1943–44, is the result. He died of pneumonia in February 1944, leaving Victory Boogie Woogie unfinished.¹