Piet Mondrian: 10 things to know about the pioneering modernist

• 1
• Mondrian’s first job after graduation was drawing bacteria

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan 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 a 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 Leiden University.

• 2
• Mondrian was never a commercially successful artist

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.

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

• 3
• Mondrian toyed with the idea of subsisting as an olive picker

According to his biographer, Hans Janssen — writing in 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 mostly 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 today the largest in the world.

• 4
• He was inspired by Fauvism, Pointillism, Luminism and Van Gogh

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’ toil, he was beginning to create art that might be called progressive.

Fauvism, Pointillism, Luminism and Vincent van Gogh all proved sources of inspiration — as can be seen in a painting such as 1908’s 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 had grown markedly lighter and more colourful than before, his brushwork sketchier and more spontaneous, and there was a definite move away from naturalism towards abstraction.

• 5
• Mondrian also dabbled in Cubism

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

• 6
• Mondrian co-founded the art periodical and movement De Stijl

In 1917, Mondrian and three of his compatriots — Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck and Vilmos Huszár — founded the art periodical and movement De Stijl. 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.

De Stijl is sometimes seen as a response to the First World War — as the search for a new type of art rooted in a basic harmony which mankind would have done well to adopt. Van Doesburg himself said he hoped the style might ‘develop forces of sufficient strength to enable it to influence all culture’.

Mondrian quit De Stijl in the mid-1920s after a fall-out with Van Doesburg, but would retain an adherence to geometric abstraction for the rest of his career.

• 7
• He produced his most famous work while living in Paris between the wars

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, but in fact he was 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 the authorities) was lifted.

• 8
• ‘The position of the artist is humble,’ Mondrian said. ‘He is, essentially, a channel’

With his canvases of the 1920s and 1930s, Mondrian dedicated himself to the pursuit of balance, rhythm and economy. 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.

• 9
• He fled the Nazis — who labelled him ‘degenerate’ — and moved to London

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 Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. When the Blitz (the German bombing campaign against Britain) started in the summer of 1940, however, he embarked on the perilous journey to the US.

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, from 1942. He also began experimenting with adhesive tape, applying it to his canvases and painting over it.

Mondrian died from pneumonia in 1944, aged 71.

• 10
• Many of Mondrian’s grid paintings remain in private hands

Fifteen works by Mondrian have fetched more than $5 million at auction since 2000. All but two of these were painted in his golden period, the 1920s and 1930s.

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