The Dutch artist Piet Mondrian: A Life in 10 Snippets - Art History School

Hello, my name is Paul Priestley. Welcome to Artists in School, the home of art history for young people and interested amateurs. Today I'm going to be looking at the artist Piet Mondrian, one of the great pioneers of abstract painting. I'll cover his life in just 10 short snippets of information. But before we talk about Piet Mondrian's life, there's one interesting thing you need to know about his personality. He was a man with two conflicting traits to his temperament that had a great influence on his painting. One was a sense of feeling for rhythm, which was reflected in his interest in music and particularly jazz. This seemed to reflect his positive side of his nature. The other was his love of order and balance. And these two conflicting qualities ebbed and flowed throughout the development of his work, but eventually found resolution in his later abstract paintings. Snippet number one. Piet Mondrian was born in Ambersfoort in Holland on the 7th of March 1872. In 1880 he moved to Winterswijk when his father, who was a qualified drawing teacher, became headmaster of the local Christian school. At 16 he left school to start studying painting and drawing and passed his lower certificate examination in 1889, which allowed him to teach at his father's primary school. In his free time he painted landscapes in a rather traditional fashion. Snippet number two. In 1892 Mondrian moved to Amsterdam and entered the Rijksacademie. He left three years later and earned his living making copies of famous paintings. In 1897 he became a member of St Lucas, the artist's association for students of the Rijksacademie and for the next few years continued working by painting copies of museum paintings and producing scientific drawings. Now during this period he started to exhibit his own landscape painting. His paintings were much influenced by the Hague school, a group of Dutch artists who took their inspiration from the idealized and naturalistic painting of the French Barbism movement of the 1830s and 1840s. But he had little success selling these paintings. Snippet number three. In 1905 he saw an exhibition of the early work of Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam which had a profound effect on him, influencing him to use bold color and more vibrant brushwork. He was also inspired from an early age in his career by the fascination for trees and seemed to be attracted to the problem of how branches, twigs, sky and foliage interact with each other. He enjoyed the rhythmic structure they represented and how that could be represented on a canvas. During this time he exhibited a lot of work but despite developing a reputation for evening landscape paintings he still sold very little. In 1908 he visited Domburg where he met several avant-garde artists including the Dutch artist Jan Troop. These artists were very interested in divisionism which put simply means the application of color in small separate blocks similar to pointillist painting. You can see their influence in these paintings. Snippet number four. In 1911 Piet Mondrian exhibited work in Nantes and Paris and saw the cubist paintings of Picasso for the first time. He moved to Paris and almost married his friend Greta but changed his mind at the last minute. Some of his paintings were sent to the Galerie der Sturm in Berlin but sales were very limited. Trees were still an important source of inspiration but as you can see with these paintings Mondrian's ideas were developing. Notice how the negative space, the shapes between the branches becomes as important as the branches themselves. Notice also how these shapes and lines are organized into a structure which is not a tree but the spirit of a tree. These were the first paintings in which he used neutral titles such as composition one, brackets, trees which is shown here. By the end of 1913 his subject matter began to move away from the heavy reliance on trees as objects to a more spiritual interpretation of the world. Snippet number five. In 1914 he visited the Netherlands to visit his sick father but was unable to return to Paris until 1918 because of the first world war. During this enforced exile he got to know the artist and critic Theo van Dorsberg who admired his abstract compositions but despite this Mondrian was still surviving by making copies of other artworks. In 1917 he submitted his ideas about paintings in a manuscript called the new plastic in painting or neoplasticism as it became known to a new magazine called the Stijl, the style. Neoplasticism or a better term might be new art described Mondrian's vision of the ideal pure form of art and design which he felt after the chaos and slaughter of art demanded and deserved. It was to be a pure type of abstract art influenced in part by cubism and suprematism and designed to adhere to the strict rules of composition. The idea was to strip out all naturalism and all other essentials from the painting in order to attain the universal truths outlined by this theosophical movement. There isn't time here to explain the principles of theosophy, cubism or suprematism unfortunately. This period saw all representations of reality disappear from his paintings. His main aim now was to express the relationships between colours and shapes rather than objects in his paintings. Snippet number six. In 1919 before moving back to Paris he packed up all his naturalistic paintings that he painted during the war and sold them to the art dealer Sal Schleiper. He was determined to break away from the past and to paint his first neoplastic composition. This is that painting. Not surprisingly it is called composition A. He said of this painting, I have now made a painting that pleases me more than any of my previous work. It has been a long quest. Have you noticed how some of the colours take up different positions in space? Some come forward and others recede all because of the context they are in. Like Matisse would do in the 1950s Mondrian began to experiment with cutting out coloured squares in paper and putting them on his wall. He was seeking to create balance and harmony with colour and line. He believed this could be achieved even if there was discord between the various elements of the painting. Snippet number seven. In 1921 he moved back into his former studio in the Rue de Depart where he lived in 1914. The studio was organised according to the rules of neoplasticism and its radical layout became a huge talking point amongst journalists and interior designers. Through their writings he became known to a wider public and during the next few years he wrote more articles about neoplasticism and his great love of music. But his main source of income was still being generated from paintings of watercolours of flowers and still lives. However in 1925 his fortunes began to change. More and more people visited his studio and showed an interest in his paintings, even his experimental diamond paintings. It was during this year he sold his first painting to a French collector. Snippet number eight. In 1926 he exhibited work in Dresden and Munich and made contact with collectors from Switzerland and the United States. He continued to write articles on neoplasticism and jazz. In fact his love of American music and dance drove him to declare that he would never go back to the Netherlands if the dance the Charleston was banned. He also spent time redesigning his studio again. In 1929 saw his first painting sold to Catherine Dreyer in New York. His abstract paintings were beginning to sell and he told friends that he had no more time to paint flowers and still lives. His painting was becoming more radical and by 1931 colour was beginning to disappear from his work to be dominated by white planes and black lines which differed in width. Snippet number nine. 1932 saw Mondrian develop the idea of line in his paintings by simply repeating them. This became known as his double line as can be seen in these examples here. His paintings were now selling well, particularly those with double lines. His painting Composition with Yellow Lines was bought by his friends and offered by them to the Steglich Museum in Amsterdam but they refused it. Maybe it was too radical for them. However in 1934 he met the English abstract artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson and he heard the music of Louis Armstrong for the very first time. But his health was declining and he became seriously ill and was unable to paint for most of 1935. Yet his work was becoming more and more popular, selling well in Great Britain and the but in Germany the reaction was quite different. Under Hitler's regime his painting was declared degenerate and examples were included in the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937 held in Munich. Under Hitler's cultural policy degenerate art was seen as an insult to German feeling and included all modernist painting and of course any work by artists of Jewish or Bolshevik origin. Snippet number 10. In 1938 Mondrian left France for England and created a new studio which this time he painted completely white. But he was not in England for long because during the blitz in 1940 a German V1 rocket landed close to his studio destroying several houses. So he left for New York. New York fascinated him. He liked the street lights, such a contrast to the enforced blackout designed to mitigate night-time bombing that he'd experienced in Britain. He loved the jazz and the sheer novelty of New York. He even seemed to love the traffic, maybe because the traffic grid system appealed to his sense of order and followed his ideas of neoplasticism. It was in New York that he first experienced the dance craze, the boogie-woogie. This experience had a profound effect on his painting to such an extent that he began to change the paintings he had brought over from England by painting small colour planes to replace the black lines. His last completed painting, the Broadway boogie-woogie of 1942, seems to reflect the influence of New York but can also be seen as the culmination of his life's work. In many ways the painting reflects the coming together of the two sides of his personality. On the one side his love of rhythm exemplified by the boogie-woogie and on the other his love of balance and order. From these contrasts and contradictions he created harmony. Piet Mondrian died on the 31st of January 1944, aged 71. He was one of the true pioneers of abstract painting. Thank you for watching. I hope you've learned lots about the great abstract artist Piet Mondrian. If you've enjoyed the video, please give it a like and don't forget to subscribe, that would be much appreciated. If you want to support Artists in School in the making of these videos, please check out my Patreon channel, where you can get great rewards for your support and patronage. Cheers!