Piet Mondrian Prints

About Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian was born Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan in Amersfoort in 1872, the son of a headmaster and amateur draughtsman, and trained at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. For nearly twenty years he painted Dutch landscapes, windmills, farms along the rivers near Amsterdam and the dunes of Zeeland, moving from the muted tones of the Hague School to the bright, broken colour he found at Domburg after 1908. In 1911 he saw Cubism and moved to Paris, where his trees and facades dissolved into grids of lines. Kept in the Netherlands by the First World War, he reached pure abstraction in works such as Composition 10 in Black and White, and in 1917 he joined Theo van Doesburg in founding the magazine De Stijl. Back in Paris from 1919, he formulated Neo-Plasticism: straight lines, right angles, the three primary colours and white, grey and black, set in asymmetrical balance. He left for London in 1938 and New York in 1940, where the city's grid and its music, especially boogie-woogie, gave his last paintings a new rhythm. He died in New York in 1944. A Mondrian is the most architectural thing that can hang on a wall: it does not depict a room so much as organise one.