Mondrian E-Book

Jp. A. Calosse

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 43

Beschreibung

Mondrian

Leseprobe

Author: Jp. A. Calosse

Cover: Stéphanie Angoh

ISBN 978-1-78160-601-8

© Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA

© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

© ARS, New York/Beeldrecht, Amsterdam

All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Jp. A. Calosse

TABLE OF CONTENT

The Beginning: 1872-1925

The Years Between: 1925-1940

The Metropolis: 1940-1944

Mondrian's New York Works: Theory and Practice

The Immediate Followers

1.Victory Boogie-Woogie, 1943-44.

Oil on canvas with colour ribbon paper.

Gemeentemuseum, The Hague

The Beginning: 1872-1925

By the centenary of his birth in Holland on March 7, 1872, Piet Mondrian had become a celebrated international figure. There were major exhibitions of his work in the United States and abroad, beginning with a retrospective at New York's Guggenheim Museum in the fall of 1971.

The artist's life and work were extolled in papers and articles published in more than 30 symposia, books, and periodicals. It is appropriate that most of these tributes originated in America, where Mondrian lived as a war refugee during the last four years of his life.

He had long held a dream of the United States as the land of the future and designed his paintings as harbingers of a "new world image."

The image changed in America yet the theory remained basically as formed in Europe. It was rooted in Holland, as were many aspects of the artist's personality and artistic philosophy.

His father attained diplomas in drawing, French, and headmastership in The Hague and taught there for several years before being appointed headmaster of a school in Amersfoort. During the ten years that he and his wife Christina Kok lived there, they had the first four of their five children. They named their second child and eldest son (according to the Dutch spelling) Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Jr.

Uncle Frits Mondriaan often visited his brother's family when he worked in the vicinity of Winterswijk. There, and later in Amsterdam, he tookhis nephew on sketching expeditions into the surrounding countryside. Piet acquired technical skill from his uncle, if not his sense of composition. Any comparison of canvases by the two makes clear that the younger artist's understanding of spatial relationships far exceeded that of the elder.

2.Last photograph of Mondrianin New York, 1944,

taken by Fritz Glarner

A family friend paid for young Piet's studies at the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Art, which he attended from the ages of 19 to 22.

While he continued to paint landscapes, and occasionally to sell them, Piet's artistic interests gradually turned away from those of his father and uncle.

He became less and less a realist and, while he continued to use the same painterly strokes as before, the young Mondrian began to heighten his color, influenced by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works brought back by friends from Paris.

The artist explained his transitional work of this time by saying that he had "increasingly allowed color and line to speak for themselves" in order to create beauty "more forcefully . . . without verisimilitude."

Through consistent abstraction, he realized that the straight line had greater tension than the curved line and could therefore express a concept like vastness better than a natural line.

3.The Mill at Domburg, 1909

He had been so inspired by the French Cubist paintings exhibited in the fall of 1911 in Amsterdam that he left for Paris the following spring in order to confront their sources more directly.

The artist was thoroughly committed to Picasso's and Braque's theory of Cubism. Mondrian worked to suppress the solids and voids of natural subjects in favor of their flat, geometric equivalents.

The elements were no longer identifiable as belonging in nature yet were still vaguely natural in form and color. This equivocation brought him to a turning-point:“Gradually I became aware that Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction toward its ultimate goal, the expression of pure reality. . . .“

Mondrian lived in Paris for two years before he was called home in 1914 by the illness of his father.

4.Dune II, 1909.

Gemeentemuseum, The Hague

5.Dune, c.1910

6.The Mill, 1907-08.

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

He expected to stay in Holland only a fortnight, but World War I erupted while he was there and the Dutch borders were closed. This forced him to remain for five years.

What seemed at first a depressing turn of events, however, became a fortunate hiatus. During the years 1914 to 1919 he met several other painters, sculptors, designers, architects, and writers who were either native to the country or found themselves in it because of war.