Piet Mondrian

For Piet Mondrian, abstract painting was the means of achieving an equilibrium between the “concrete” (the tangible and specific aspects of reality perceived by the senses) and the “universal” (the underlying, essential truths that he believed were constant and unchanging). “The first aim in a painting should be universal expression,” he told the MoMA curator James Johnson Sweeney toward the end of his life. “The second aim should be concrete, universal expression.”¹ He believed deeply in progress, and was convinced that his art was moving toward achieving a synthesis of the two terms in a way that would precipitate a utopian future in which the distinction between art and life would be dissolved.

Mondrian began his artistic training at 20, but didn’t even begin to think about abstract painting until he was nearly 40, when he saw an exhibition of Cubist art in Amsterdam in 1911. “One can never appreciate enough the splendid effort of Cubism,” he later wrote of the movement. It “broke with the natural appearance of things” and laid the foundation, upon which Mondrian’s own abstract art, “previously imprisoned by limited form,” could become free.²

To conceive of a totally abstract art is one thing, but the process of becoming free was quite another. The latter necessitated a total rethinking of the traditions of Western art and aesthetics, which had until recently prioritized figuration. Having moved to Paris in 1914, Mondrian returned to Holland for a summer holiday but became stuck there after the outbreak of World War I. Unable to return home, he settled in the coastal town of Domburg, where he spent the next five years refining his techniques and digesting what he had seen in Cubist painting.

His mesmeric drawings from this period became increasingly abstract. In both Pier and Ocean 5 (Sea and Starry Sky) and Church Facade 6, for example, Mondrian distills the motifs of pier and church into a network of vertical and horizontal lines that proliferates across the paper. Far from traditional landscapes, these drawings intimate only the most essential characteristics of the objects they represent: the intersection of the vertical pier and the horizontal field of the seascape, or the horizontal arcade crossing the upward thrust of the church façade.³

Like his contemporaries Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, Mondrian’s engagement with abstraction was not only visual but philosophical. He was a prolific essayist and, during the war, grew close to a group of Dutch painters including Theo van Doesburg, with whom he founded De Stijl The Style, an international art journal in which he published much of his writing. The context of De Stijl suited Mondrian. It was a collective of artists, architects, and writers who were not only committed to giving up representational art but also to bridging the gap between art and life through the extension of art into architecture and design.

It was in this context that Mondrian formulated the general principles of the idiom for which he is best known: Neo-Plasticism. Alongside the work of Malevich and Kandinsky, Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic canvases, like Composition No. II, with Red and Blue, were catalytic for the development of abstraction as a modern art form. They do not begin with a natural motif and instead create meaning using a visual language of rectangular planes rendered in primary colors divided by a grid of jet-black lines. For Mondrian, Neo-Plasticism was more than an artistic style; it was an aesthetic philosophy that concerned itself with the dissolution of hierarchies in both art and society. Through it he sought to dissolve the formal hierarchies of figure and ground, subject and object, and line and color that had been fundamental to Western art since the Renaissance. This, he hoped, would offer an artistic blueprint for restoring order and balance to everyday life after the war. He even dedicated a pamphlet on Neo-Plasticism “to the men of the future.”

Mondrian stayed in Paris, working in this mode, until World War II, when political upheaval once again necessitated relocation. This time, he moved to New York, arriving in October 1940. Mondrian had always loved jazz but in New York his affection for the genre became an obsession; he would dance around his studio, playing the same records over and over. He sought out jazz clubs and became a fixture at Café Society, New York’s first interracial nightclub.⁴

Boogie-woogie—a type of blues undergoing a resurgence in the 1940s—was especially important to Mondrian’s artistic thinking in New York. Toward the end of his life, he worked almost exclusively on two paintings—Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Victory Boogie-Woogie. As the titles suggest, music was critical to their conception. Each painting is constructed using lines of shifting color, which interrupt each other, blink, and dance. There is a dynamism in these canvases that escapes any static element remaining in Mondrian’s art; they are a testament to the vibrant sonic life of New York. “The great struggle for the artist,” Mondrian wrote, “is the annihilation of static equilibrium in their paintings…Abstract art is a concrete expression of such a vitality.”⁵

Note: Opening quote is from “An Interview with Mondrian (1946),” in The New Art, the New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James.

Benjamin Price, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2023–24