Piet Mondrian: 10 things to know about the pioneering modernist

Pieter Cornelis Mondrian was born in the town of Amersfoort in the Netherlands in 1872 (he would drop the second ‘a’ from his surname in later life, as a way of distancing himself from his Dutch roots). 

His father was the headmaster of a Calvinist primary school. His uncle,  Frits, was a landscape painter, and gave him his first instruction in art. Aged 20, Pieter moved to Amsterdam to study painting at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, where he received classical training. ‘I began like anybody else,’ he recalled, years later. 

After graduation, he took a job drawing bacteria under a microscope for scientific researchers at the University of Leiden. 

Mondrian was never a commercially successful artist. For much of his long career, he produced watercolours of flowers as a sideline to support himself. 

According to the biographer Hans Janssen — author of Piet Mondrian: A Life (2022) — even in the 1920s, at the peak of his powers, ‘his lack of success gave him severe doubts’. At different moments, Mondrian toyed with the idea of becoming a church minister and an olive picker.

He only ever had one dedicated collector: Salomon Slijper, a Dutch real estate developer. Slijper acquired work predominantly made before the end of the First World War and, on his death in 1971, bequeathed it all to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Numbering almost 300 pieces, that museum’s Mondrian collection is the largest in the world.  

Mondrian’s early works were landscapes in the Hague School tradition: that is, broadly naturalistic scenes of the Dutch countryside, characterised by their subdued colour and muted light. He particularly liked to paint windmills on and near the Gein, a small waterway outside Amsterdam.  

Fauvism, Pointillism, Luminism and Vincent van Gogh all proved sources of inspiration — as can be seen in a painting such as 1908’s The Windmill in Sunlight (part of Slijper’s bequest to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag).  

In these years, Mondrian also paid regular visits to Domburg, a coastal town in the province of Zeeland. He produced numerous paintings of its seaside, sand dunes and piers. His palette has grown markedly lighter and more colourful than before, his brushwork sketchier and more spontaneous, and there is a definite move away from naturalism towards abstraction. 

The end of the first decade of the 20th century was a noteworthy time for Mondrian. He was in his mid-to-late thirties — and now, finally, after many years of struggle, beginning to create art that might be called progressive. 

Late in 1911, Mondrian broke up with his fiancée, Greta Heijbroek. He left Amsterdam for Paris shortly thereafter (and never married). Once settled in the French capital, he became an adherent of Cubism, the style recently pioneered Picasso and Georges Braque.  

Mondrian’s Cubist work tended to be more abstract than that of the founding duo. His subject (often a tree) is commonly unrecognisable, or close-to-unrecognisable, reduced to interlocking black lines and planes of colour. 

In the summer of 1914, Mondrian returned to his homeland to visit his sick father, only for the outbreak of the First World War to prevent him from heading back to Paris again for several years. 

Mondrian and three of his compatriots — Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Vilmos Huszár — founded the art periodical and movement, De Stijl, in 1917. They rejected depictions of the world they saw around them, advocating instead a visual language shrunk to the bare essentials of form and colour. This meant orthogonal shapes (rectangles and squares) painted in the primary colours (supplemented by black, white or grey). 

Mondrian moved back to Paris after the First World War and stayed there for the better part of two decades. He tends to be remembered today as an austere character. He was, however, a keen lover of music —  especially jazz — and enjoyed dancing.  According to Janssen, Mondrian told the Dutch press in 1926 that he refused to return to the Netherlands until a national ban on the Charleston (a dance deemed overly sensual by authorities) was lifted. 

With his canvases of the 1920s and 1930s, Mondrian dedicated himself tirelessly to the pursuit of balance, rhythm and economy. Using only straight lines, primary and neutral colours, Mondrian pioneered a unique form of geometric abstraction known as Neo-Plasticism. Each work featured minor variations in the choice and shade of the colours, the thickness of the black lines and the size and shape of the geometrical grids. 

‘It is not enough to place side by side a red, a blue, a yellow, and a grey, because that remains merely decorative,’ he once wrote in the magazine De Stijl. ‘It has to be the right red, blue, yellow, grey, etc.: each right in itself and right in relation to the others.’ 

In 1937, two pieces by Mondrian were included in the Entartete Kunst (‘degenerate art’) exhibition in Munich. Organised by the Nazi regime, this was a vast show of modern art, all of which was deemed morally and aesthetically inappropriate for the citizens of the new German Reich. A year later, Mondrian thought it wise to leave the European mainland for the relative safety of London. 

He moved to the suburb of Hampstead, a few doors down from the artist couple, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Once the Blitz (the German bombing campaign against Britain) started in the summer of 1940, however, he embarked on a perilous journey to the US. 

In September 1940, with Europe ravaged by war, Mondrian boarded a Cunard ocean liner in Liverpool, bound for New York City. The ship formed part of a convoy that travelled with all the lights turned off at night. It lost five vessels to German U-boat attacks en route.  

Mondrian himself made it across the Atlantic unscathed. Now in his late sixties, he would see out the final few years of his life in New York — and leave behind a legacy as one of abstraction’s great pioneers.  

Time didn’t allow Mondrian to produce much work there, but his art in New York is characterised by a greater sense of freedom than before. He dispensed with black lines, for example, creating grids out of coloured bands instead — as can be seen in paintings such as New York City. He also began experimenting with adhesive tape: applying it to his canvases and painting over it.  

Mondrian died from pneumonia in 1944, aged 71.  

Twenty-two works by Mondrian have fetched more than $5 million at auction since 2000. All but two of these were painted in his golden period of the 1920s and 1930s. Six works have achieved over $20 million since 2004.  

‘Every man on the street recognises those grid paintings as Mondrians,’ says Arno Verkade, managing director of Christie’s in Amsterdam. ‘They have a universal recognition as canonical works of modern art. In their beautiful simplicity, they also have a universal appeal, no matter where in the world you’re from. Which is why I think there’s still room for plenty of growth in the market.’