A selection of works by Piet Mondrian (Netherlands, 1872 – United States, 1944), the Dutch pioneer of abstract art and founding father of Neoplasticism, are displayed alongside works by some of his fellow De Stijl artists, like Theo van Doesburg, Hendrik Berlage and Jacoba van Heemskerck. The exhibition comprises paintings, drawings, sculptures, plans, furnishings, documents, and life-sized reconstructions of two rooms designed by these artists.
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. The publication promoted a new and innovative artistic style based strictly on the interactions between rectangular forms, coloured planes and straight lines. It demolished the boundaries between diverse disciplines, merging painting with architecture, applied arts with sculpture, and claiming design as an art form. This multi-disciplinary approach was adopted by artists all over the world, who interacted through the magazine and by letters.
Piet Mondrian, who formed part of De Stijl, started by painting Dutch landscapes, a classic genre that remained the focus of his work 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, or may not, be beautiful to the eye of the beholder. This belief dominated his work from then on.
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
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