Piet Mondrian portrait — Photo by Arnold Newman via arquitecturaviva.com

Instantly recognizable with their bright squares popping in primary colors, expanses of bright white, and intersecting lines in asymmetrical grids, Mondrian’s modern art was groundbreaking in its day, and still inspires the artists, architects, and designers of today. In looking at Mondrian’s influence on modern art and design, we explore the life of this avant-garde artist.

Piet Mondrian continually sought to refine his art throughout his life, distilling the process of representation in painting to the most honest reflections possible. The subject matter was big: nature, the cosmos, and existence, and what he found to be the truest interpretations of these existential concepts were the stripped down pureness of line, shape, and color.

Piet Mondrian modern art canvas with red blue white and black in his trademark grids and squares — Photo via moma.org

Born in 1872 in Amersfoort, in the province of Utrecht, the Netherlands, Mondrian’s father and uncle, both artists, encouraged him from an early age to draw. He attended the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, the state academy for classical fine arts, and early works were of naturalistic countryside scenes in moody and muted tones.

Cubism’s first museum exhibition, Moderne Kunstkring, came to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk museum in 1911, introducing Mondrian to Picasso and Braque’s Cubist works. So intrigued was he by this avant-garde style, Mondrian decided to move to Paris the following year, to further explore its modernist scenes. He stayed in Paris for two years, and during this time, his pictorial representations took on a much more Cubist look, as they evolved into more abstract interpretations.

When a visit to the Netherlands coincided with the start of World War I, Mondrian was unable to return to Paris. He remained in the Netherlands for the duration of the war, and though far from Paris’ thriving arts scene, found the time at home to be fruitful. He wrote and published his theories on Neoplasticism, and together with Theo Van Doesburg, the artist and founder of the De Stijl magazine, co-founded the De Stijl arts movement.

Mondrian’s Neoplasticism was extremely detailed, structured, and defined in its precepts, and these drove not only the appearance and style of his own artwork, but that of his fellow De Stijl group members as well. Artist, architect, and De Stijl member Gerritt Rietveld’s Schröder House and Red Blue Chair are examples of Neoplasticism interpreted for furniture, interior, and architectural design.

Some of the principles of Neoplasticism, easily spotted in Mondrian’s own work, include:

The medium for a design should be a flat plane or rectangular shape in primary colors, or black, white, and gray non-colors (when translated to architecture the physical materials would be the “colors” in the design, and the open spaces the “non-colors”).
The presence of opposing elements is necessary for creating balance within a composition, and every composition must always be balanced. Colors are balanced by non-colors, and large empty blank spaces are balanced by smaller more colorful ones (in architecture, this translates to pairing big open spaces with smaller areas filled with physical objects and/or matter).
Symmetry should always be avoided.
Proportion, depending on how it’s used, can create or negate feelings of equilibrium in a piece.
Flat representations are better than attempts to realistically recreate 3D objects.
Flat displays of color make them appear stronger and more dynamic.

The balance and harmony Mondrian sought to portray in his artwork, and which features so heavily in his Neoplastic ideas, represent the vast harmonies of nature and mind, masculine and feminine, and the individual and universal. He believed these unions possible to achieve, not only on the canvas, but within society as well, and he used his compositions as opportunities to demonstrate the balance and equilibrium possible between opposing elements.

Mondrian’s Neoplasticism appealed to architects with its approach to creating spatial harmony via well balanced proportions, and his ideas were well received by the Bauhaus School in his day. Several of his Neoplastic essays written for the De Stijl magazine were translated and published in the Bauhausbücher Book (several of these essays were recently compiled into a 2019 edition of the publication), and according to Bauhaus Kooperation, Mondrian’s art and philosophy influenced Bauhaus architecture, product design, typography, graphic design, painting, and more. Michel Seuphor, a Belgian painter, founder of the literary magazine Het Overzicht, and co-founder of the Parisian abstract artists group Cercle et Carré said, “Mondrian's sense of proportion is literally the aesthetic yardstick for all the structures produced by the building book of the fifties - office building, schools, factories, bloks (sic) of apartment houses, one-family houses, weekend houses … “ (Seuphor, 1976,15 via http://jfa.arch.metu.edu.tr/).

Photo bauhausbucher via shop.bauhaus-movement.com

A group De Stijl show at the Galerie de L’Effort Moderne included Theo Van Doesburg and architect Cornelis Van Eesteren’s designs for their Maison Particulière and Maison d’Artiste, additional examples of modern architectural designs based on Mondrian’s Neoplastic principles. The plans appear like 3D interpretations of Mondrian’s own art, with their primary colored floors, ceilings, and walls set amongst striking vertical and horizontal planes.

Mondrian left the De Stijl group a few years after its founding, when the diagonal line was introduced and embraced by co-founder Van Doesburg, and following the end of WWI, he returned to Paris. This stay lasted twenty years, and was a time in which he deepened his Neoplastic explorations, incorporating his design theories into the interior design of his studios, resulting in immersive live/work spaces that were like the insides of his paintings (the aesthetic has since been recreated in several museum exhibits). As quoted in an article in The Guardian, Mondrian said of the artist’s studio, “It breathes your ideas.”….

By the beginning of WWII, Mondrian and his art had been classified as “degenerate” by Nazi Germany (some of his artworks were included in the Degenerate Art Show of 1937), and by 1938 he left Paris for London, where he stayed for two years before moving on to New York in 1940. In New York City he was welcomed with open arms by the American modern art community, who already knew and appreciated his work.

Mondrian was known for loving jazz and dancing, and the infinite black lines that ran unendingly the length and width of his canvases evolved into something even more dynamic in his later years. In Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie, his last two pieces, the black lines disappeared altogether, and were replaced by jaunty Pac Man-esque grids dancing in primary colors, echoing the vibrant and ever forward marching rhythms of New York City.

Mondrian died four years after arriving in the U.S., at the age of 71, Victory Boogie Woogie still on the easel. His life offers perspective on what an actual artist’s artistic timeline can be. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-40s that he began his breakthrough work, and through the following three decades (his 40s, 50s, and 60s, up until his death) Mondrian continued to push the boundaries of modern art. A conservation project by the Fondation Beyeler and La Prairie found, with infrared technology and high-magnification devices, that Mondrian sometimes painted over old artworks in order to create new ones. For him, it seems the urge for evolution was never over.

Mondrian’s art has continued to inspire designers and artists throughout the decades. Highlights include Roy Lichtenstein’s 1964 Non-Objective I; Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic 1965 Mondrian Dress; L’Oreal’s 1980s era branding; Moschino’s 1993 “Art is Love” dress; Nike’s 2008 SB Dunk Low Pro shoe; a cake by Caitlin Freeman, introduced in 2010 and served at the San Francisco MOMA Museum Cafe; several dresses in Miuccia Prada’s 2011 Ready-to-Wear Collection; PA Design’s 2014 sticky notes; costumes in Katy Perry’s 2014 This Is How We Do music video; and the design of Rumyantsevo Moscow metro station, among many others.

Photos courtesy of Arnold Newman, arquitecturaviva.com, moma.org, artsy.net, boldbrush.com, pietmondrian.eu, dezeen.com, Stijn Poelstra, Centraal Museum, bauhausbucher, shop.bauhaus-movement.com, medium.com, architecturaldigest.com, design-milk.com, mondrianroute.com, Douglas M. Parker Studio, the Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, thebroad.org, Vogue, Gemeente Museum Den Haag, sleek-mag.com, artisticusj.wordpress.com, theguardian.com, Nicholas Alan Cope, metmuseum.org, sneakerbardetroit.com, Monica Feudi, Feudiguaineri.com, vogue.com, news.artnet.com, wikipedia.org, arthive.com, mos.ru, and wikipedia commons.

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