The Dutch artist, Piet Mondrian (Netherlands, 1872 – United States, 1944) features in this Reina Sofía Museum exhibition, which delves into the artistic style he founded, Neoplasticism, an abstract art based on the relations between rectangular shapes, colour planes, and straight lines.
In October 1917, whilst the world was suffering the effects of the First World War, a group of young Dutch artists created the De Stijl magazine, which promoted a new and innovative artistic style that demolished the boundaries between diverse disciplines, merging painting with architecture, applied arts with sculpture and design started to be considered as art. This multi-disciplinary approach was adopted by artists all over the world, who communicated via the magazine and by letter.
Piet Mondrian, who formed part of De Stijl, began painting Dutch landscapes, a classic genre that he followed for 20 years. In 1905, he concluded that beauty does not lie in the subject or in what a painting may represent, but in the way in which shapes and colours produce a pictorial plasticity that may be beautiful to the eye of the beholder, which dominated in his work from then on.
The exhibition, located in the museum’s Sabatini Building, is made up of works by Mondrian as well as that of some of his fellows from the movement
Image Credit:
Piet Mondrian, Composition with red, black, yellow and grey, 1921. Oil on canvas, 39.5 x 35 cm, Kunstmuseum Den Haag © Mondrian // Holtzman Trust
