Pit Mondrian, artist: short biography and interesting facts

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

A great artist always leaves behind paintings filled not only with meanings, but also with riddles. Especially if it is an abstract painter. This article provides a biography of the artist Piet Mondrian, paintings with the name and history of the creation of the most famous of them.

The artist Mondrian: childhood

Pete was born in the Netherlands, in a small provincial town called Amersfoort. In general, initially, the boy's name was Peter Cornelis Mondrian. It was later, for easier "assimilation" of the name of the new artist by the public, Mondrian began to sign as Piet.

His father was a teacher and later became the director of a small school. The family was very devout, and it was from his father that Pete learned such things as patience, diligence, diligence and modesty. Despite his fame, the artist retained these features after a while.

After finishing school, Mondrian leaves for Amsterdam.

First steps in creativity

Entering in 1892 at the Academy of Arts, which is located in Amsterdam, Mondrian plunges headlong into artistic creativity. One of his teachers isOpost Allebe, whom Pete has the deepest respect and reverence for.

From 1895, he began to study in the evening, because the financial situation forces him to paint portraits or copies of famous paintings for exhibitions during the day. Very often the artist Piet Mondrian (his environment already knows him under that name) leaves to write sketches somewhere on the river bank, outside the city. One of the most famous paintings of this period is "The Mill on the Bank of the River". For the first time this canvas was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And for the first time it was "declared" to the creative bohemia that such an artist Piet Mondrian had appeared. A photo of the master is given below.

Teachers and influence

The artist Mondrian began to teach at a small art school for children, which brought him, albeit small, but stable money. The same period is marked by the formation of the artist as a very high-quality landscape painter, writing in the spirit of impressionism.

Even at the end of the nineteenth century, the artist Piet Mondrian met Albert Bril, a beginner in his studies, an adherent of theosophy. Under the influence of the latter, the artist begins a period of passion for mysticism, esotericism and non-canonical religion. Ten years later, Pete will join the Dutch Theosophical Society. Of course, like children's religious education, new hobbies will greatly affect all subsequent work of the artist.

After he was in Amsterdam, in 1911, he visited the exhibition of "cubists", became very interested in "cubism" andI even tried myself in this manner. Mondrian was especially fond of the work of Picasso. Pete moves to Paris, works in a workshop and tries not to miss exhibitions of his colleagues. If we talk about the period of passion for "cubism", then we can call the painting "Apple Tree in Bloom".

Becoming an artist

Piet Mondrian begins to travel a lot around Europe - for informational purposes. I visited Spain, then began to travel around Holland. Settles in the small village of Uden, in the province of Brabant.

Below will be given some pictures with names and descriptions. Piet Mondrian is gradually gaining strength as an expressionist, although, of course, he is still looking for the style in which he would like to work. Experts note that in the paintings of the early twentieth century, the colors are very strong, and the plot fades into the background.

For example:

• "Evening landscape".
• "Farm at Nistelrode".
• "Red Cloud".
• "Forest near Ole".
• "Westkapelle lighthouse".
• "Dune V".
• "Silver tree".

Recognition and criticism of contemporaries

While the First World War was going on, the artist Piet Mondrian spent all his time at home, in the Netherlands. In 1915, together with the artist Theo van Doesburg, with whom he was very close at that time, he founded the movement of artists "Style", and at the same time the magazine of the same name, in which he preached his views on the artistic creativity of the future. Critics and researchers of the artist Mondrian believe thatit was this magazine that became a kind of platform for the development of the views of neoplasticism. This style is based on a scrupulous, detailed transfer of the artist's inner state or some particular emotion, with a very ascetic set of colors or shapes, be it geometric shapes, lines, etc.

Style and direction

Mondrian painted his paintings according to the scheme, which experts call "plus or minus". That is, if we consider the artist's canvases solely from the point of view of what forms are depicted there, but you can see the overwhelming number of horizontal and vertical intersections - "plus or minus". The artist urged to completely abandon natural forms, believing that only abstraction is able to convey everything that is happening in the human soul.

Also, many researchers of the artist's work note that "male and female" has great meaning in his paintings. Twisted spiral shapes, rounded shapes of the ocean - all this refers to the feminine, while billowing lighthouses, walls, vertical rays - to the masculine. For example, the painting "Mole and Ocean" is a combination of feminine smoothness with masculine sharpness.

Despite the fact that by the end of the First World War, Mondrian had already won a "place in the sun" in the world of artistic creativity, he continues to put real experiments with color, form and content of his paintings. In 1918, a whole series of canvases was painted, where the main figure is a rhombus. For example: "Composition. Rhombus with gray lines" or "Composition. Plans in light colors with gray lines".

Two years later, the artist Mondrian sets out his views on contemporary art in general and on artistic creativity in particular, in his work en titled "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality" (later this work was republished under the title "Neoplasticism"). In this work, the artist also gave his division of colors, shapes and other things, from which any picture is built. He divided the colors into: "primary" - red, blue, yellow and "non-colors" - black, gray, white. He also singled out the concepts of "opposition of horizontal and vertical", "opposition of dimensions". It was a great theoretical work of the artist.

The next decade and a half, Mondrian works hard, creating more than seventy paintings. The plots in the paintings are conveyed with the help of stripes, usually dark. They limit the "fields" on the canvases, which denote an emotion or state. Very good examples of paintings from this period are: "Composition with red, yellow and blue", "Composition in white and black" or "Composition 1 with black lines". In 1932, the artist depicts on canvases two parallel lines that cross the entire canvas on top of the drawing. An example of this: "Composition B with gray and yellow".

In the early thirties, a painting appeared that became key in this period of the artist Piet Mondrian's work. This is "Composition with yellowlines. "The peculiarity of this picture is that in it four wide stripes, of different colors, without interruption, cross the rhombus - the key figure on the canvas. Since then, Piet Mondrian begins to combine all the figures available to him with lines of different colors. With this combination, the artist will be engaged in the next ten years.

After Mondrian finished several series of paintings with squares, a series of paintings with "grids" begins - these are paintings with very densely intersecting lines, located both vertically and horizontally. For example, "Composition II with red and blue".

Moving to the USA and death

In 1938, in the month of September, the artist Piet Mondrian leaves for England, for London. There he works on "Trafalgar Square" - this is a very large canvas, with a combination of figures, stripes and colors, and also writes "Concorde Square". With the beginning of the bombing of London by fascist aircraft, the artist leaves for America, where he continues to work on paintings. He is received very warmly, and he arranges several shows of his work for connoisseurs of New York. Newspapers dubbed Mondrian "one of the greatest refugees from Europe." Also, while in the States, the artist makes changes to his paintings - he begins to add colored lines to the "lattices" over the main plot of the canvas.

Among the major films of this period are: "Broadway boogie-woogie" and "Boogie-woogie victory". In the same place, in the USA, during the war, the first biography was published: "The Artist Mondrian", and so the firstcollection of essays by the artist.

On February 1, 1944, the artist dies, having caught pneumonia the day before. He was buried in New York, at Cypress Hills Cemetery.

Followers

The Dutch artist influenced the entire painting of the twentieth century. Together with Malevich and Kandinsky, he is one of the three artists who laid the foundation for abstract art.

Mondrian's style was considered by many artists of the twentieth century as a classic of abstract painting and was taken as a standard. Mondrian's paintings are widely used now - in decor, in interior elements, in the design of something. The artist has always had many followers and admirers, because such a person as Piet Mondrian cannot but attract, whose paintings and biography became a reflection of the "turn of the century" and the new, twentieth, very bright century.

Famous paintings

"Broadway Boogie Woogie".

This picture was painted in 1943, already in the USA, not long before the death of the artist. She became one of the most famous works of the final period of Mondrian's creative activity. The dimensions of this painting are 127 x 127 cm, the material used is canvas, painted in oil and enamel. Now the canvas is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, which is located in New York.

"Dune view with beach and pier" (see photo below).

The painting was created in 1909, when Mondrian was just beginning his brilliant career as an artist. It is written on cardboard, with the help of oil and pencils. The painting is currently on display at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Memory of the artist

The name of Piet Mondrian becomes very famous almost immediately after his death. Posthumous exhibitions of the artist were held: in 1945 - at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1946 - at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in 1947 - at the Art Museum in Basel, and only in 1969 in Paris - at the Orangerie Museum.

Today, most of the artist's works are kept in the Municipal Museum in The Hague, in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and also in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the nineties of the XX century, the paintings of Piet Mondrian were brought to Russia, and exhibitions were held in the largest cities: "Pit Mondrian. Abstractionism." Pictures with titles were shown in 1996: in the Hermitage and in the Museum of Fine Arts. Alexandra Pushkin.

Interesting facts

Here are some of them:

• One of the programming languages (Piet), named after the artist Mondrian. The reason for this is that programs written in this language resemble an abstraction in appearance.
• In St. Petersburg, one of the buildings was painted in the style of one of Piet Mondrian's paintings, namely, Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue and Black. In 2013, the building was demolished and no more such experiments were carried out.
• Mondrian's work appears in the British TV series called Virtuosi. There, a group of thieves steal one of Mondrian's paintings from an art gallery and then replace it.fake, passing off as an unknown picture of the "early Mondrian". In reality, such a picture as presented in the series never existed.
• In Khimki near Moscow, in the "City of Embankments", all pedestrian crossings are made in the Mondrian style.
• The walls of the station were painted in the style of Mondrian at the Rumyantsevo metro station of the Moscow Metro.

In closing

The hero of this article is the artist Mondrian, whose brief biography was presented above. His paintings, far from canonized classicism, continue to excite the mind and amaze the imagination. Creating at the junction of two eras, the master showed that a new time always requires a new way of expressing yourself.