A great artist always leaves behind pictures filled not only with meanings, but also with riddles. Especially if it is an abstract painter. This article gives a biography of the artist Pete Mondrian, paintings with the name and history of the creation of the most famous of them.
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. This later, for easier “assimilation” of the name of the new artist by the public, Mondrian began to sign as Pete.
His father was a teacher, and then became the director of a small school. The family was very devout, and it was from his father that Pete learned things like patience, hard work, diligence, and modesty. Despite his fame, the artist and after a while retained these features.
After leaving school, Mondrian leaves for Amsterdam.
The first steps in creativity
Entering the Academy of Arts in Amsterdam in 1892, Mondrian plunges headlong into art classes. One of his teachers is the Post of Allebé, to which Pete treats with deep respect and reverence.
Since 1895, he begins to study in the evening, because his financial situation forces him to paint portraits or copies of famous paintings for exhibitions during the day. Very often, the artist Pete Mondrian (his surroundings already know by that name), leaves to write sketches somewhere on the river bank, out of town. One of the most famous paintings of this period is "The Mill on the River Bank". This canvas was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And for the first time it was “declared” to creative bohemia that such an artist, Pete Mondrian, had appeared. Photo master submitted 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 was marked by the formation of the artist as a very high-quality landscape painter, writing in the spirit of impressionism.
Back in the late nineteenth century, artist Pete Mondrian met a beginner in his studies, an adherent of theosophy Albert Bril. Under the influence of the latter, the artist begins a period of fascination with mysticism, esotericism and non-canonical religion. Ten years later, Pete will become part of 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" and even tried himself in this manner. Particularly strongly Mondrian became interested in the work of Picasso. Pete moves to Paris, works in a workshop and tries not to miss the exhibitions of his colleagues. If we talk about the period of fascination with "cubism", then we can call the picture "Apple tree in bloom."
Becoming an artist
Pete Mondrian begins to travel a lot in Europe - for educational purposes. Visited Spain, then began to travel around Holland. It lives in the small village of Uden, in the province of Brabant.
Below will be given some pictures with names and descriptions. Pete Mondrian is gradually gaining strength as an expressionist, although, of course, while he is 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 goes by the wayside.
For example:
- "Evening landscape".
- "Farm in Nistelrode."
- The Red Cloud.
- "Forest near Ole."
- "Lighthouse on Westcapella."
- "Dune V".
- "Silver wood."
Recognition and criticism of contemporaries
While the First World War was on, artist Pete Mondrian spent all his time in his homeland, in the Netherlands. In 1915, together with the artist Theo van Dusburg, whom he came close to 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 creation of the future. Critics and researchers of the artist Mondrian believe that this particular magazine has become a kind of platform for the development of neoplastic views. This style is based on a meticulous, detailed transfer of the artist’s internal state or any 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 a scheme that experts call "plus or minus." That is, if we consider the artist’s canvases exclusively 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 creativity note that "male and female" has great meaning in his paintings. Swirling spiral shapes, rounded ocean shapes - all this refers to the female, while billowing beacons, walls, vertical rays - to the male. For example, the painting "Mole and the Ocean" is a combination of feminine fluidity 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 art, he continues to make real experiments with the color, shape and content of his paintings. In 1918, a whole series of paintings was written, where the main figure is a rhombus. For example: "Composition. Rhombus with gray lines" or "Composition. Light color plans with gray lines."
Two years later, the artist Mondrian sets out his views on contemporary art in general, and in particular on artistic creation, in his work entitled "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality" (later this work was reprinted under the name "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 “horizontal and vertical opposition”, “opposition of measurements”. It was a great theoretical work of the artist.
Over the next decade and a half, Mondrian worked hard, creating more than seventy paintings. Subjects in the pictures are transmitted using stripes, usually dark. They limit the "margins" on the canvases that denote an emotion or state. Very good examples of paintings of that 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 canvas two parallel lines that intersect the entire canvas on top of the picture. An example of this: "Composition B with gray and yellow."
At the beginning of the thirties, a picture appeared that became key during this period of the work of the artist Pete Mondrian. This is a "Composition with yellow lines." The peculiarity of this picture is that it has four wide stripes, of different colors, without interruption, crossing a rhombus - a key figure on the canvas. Since then, Pete Mondrian begins to combine all the figures available to him with lines of different colors. The artist will be engaged in such a combination for the next ten years.
After Mondrian finished several series of paintings with squares, a series of paintings with "bars" begins - these are paintings with very densely intersecting lines located both vertically and horizontally. For example, "Composition II with red and blue."
Relocation to the USA and death
In 1938, in the month of September, the artist Pete Mondrian left for England, to London. There he works on “Trafalgar Square” - this is a very large canvas, with a combination of figures, stripes and colors, as well as writes “Place de la Concorde”. With the beginning of the bombing of London by fascist airplanes, the artist leaves for America, where he continues to work on paintings. He is received very warmly, and he arranges several shows of his works 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 "grids" over the main plot of the canvas.
Among the large paintings of this period can be called: "Broadway boogie-woogie" and "Victory boogie-woogie." In the same place, in the USA, during the war, the first biography is published: “The Artist Mondrian,” as well as the first collection of the artist’s essay.
On February 1, 1944, the artist dies, catching pneumonia the day before. He was buried in New York, at the 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 abstractionism.
Many artists of the twentieth century considered the style of Mondrian to be a classic of abstract painting and took it as a standard. Mondrian’s paintings are widely used now - in the decor, in the elements of the interior, in the design of something. The artist has always had a lot of followers and admirers, for such a person as Pete Mondrian, whose paintings and biography became a reflection of the “turn of the century” and the new, twentieth, very bright century, cannot fail to attract.
Famous paintings
"Boogie Woogie on Broadway."
This picture was painted in 1943, already in the USA, just before the artist’s death. She became one of the most famous works of the final period of the creative activity of Mondrian. The dimensions of this picture are 127 x 127 cm, the used material is canvas, painted in oil and enamel. Now the canvas is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, which is located in New York.
"View of the dunes with the beach and the pier" (photo see below).
The painting was created in 1909, when Mondrian was just beginning his brilliant career in the field of the artist. It is written on cardboard with oil and pencils. At the moment, the canvas is exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Memory of the artist
The name of Pete Mondrian becomes very famous almost immediately after death. The artist’s posthumous exhibitions were held: in 1945 - at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1946 - at the City Museum in Amsterdam, in 1947 - at the Museum of Art in Basel and only in 1969 in Paris - at the Orangerie Museum.
To date, most of the artist's works are in the Municipal Museum in The Hague, in the City Museum in Amsterdam, and also in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the nineties of the XX century, paintings by Pete Mondrian were brought to Russia, and exhibitions were held in major cities: "Pete Mondrian. Abstractionism". Pictures with names were shown in 1996: at the Hermitage and at the Museum of Fine Arts. Alexander Pushkin.
Interesting Facts
Here are some of them:
- One of the programming languages (Piet) is named after the artist Mondrian. The reason for this is because programs written in this language resemble outwardly an abstraction.
- In St. Petersburg, one of the buildings was painted according to the style of one of the paintings by Pete Mondrian, namely, under Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue and Black. In 2013, the building was demolished and more such experiments were not conducted.
- Mondrian’s work appears in the British series called “Virtuosos”. There, a group of thieves steals one of Mondrian’s paintings from the art gallery, and then substitutes it with a fake, posing as the still-unknown picture of “early Mondrian”. In reality, the picture that is presented in the series never existed.
- In Khimki, near Moscow, in the “City of Embankments”, all the pedestrian crossings are made in the style of Mondrian.
- At the Rumyantsevo metro station of the Moscow metro, the walls of the station are painted in the style of Mondrian.
Finally
The hero of this article is the artist Mondrian, whose brief biography was presented above. His paintings, far from canonized classicism, continue to excite consciousness and amaze the imagination. Created at the intersection of two eras, the master showed that new time always requires a new way of expression.