Piet Mondrian (redirected from Pieter Mondriaan)

Mondrian, Piet 

(born Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan). Born Mar. 7, 1872, in Amersfoort, near Utrecht; died Feb. 1, 1944, in New York City. Dutch painter.

From 1892 to 1897, Mondrian studied at the Academy of Arts in Amsterdam. He worked in Paris from 1911 to 1914 and from 1919 to 1938, in London from 1938 to 1940, and in New York City from 1940 until his death. One of the founders of the De Stijl group (1917), Mondrian was influenced by cubism. A striving for “universal harmony” in the spirit of Neoplatonism was expressed in the artist’s new style of painting, which he created in 1917 and called neoplasticism. One of the first variations of abstract art, neoplasticism made use of strictly balanced combinations of various rectangular forms, separated by thick perpendicular lines and painted in primary colors and in white (often predominantly), black, and gray (Composition, 1922; Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1927—both in the City Museum, Amsterdam).

WORKS

Le Neoplasticisme. Paris, 1921.
Die neue Gestaltung. Munich, 1925. (Bauhausbiicher, no. 5.)

REFERENCES

Reingardt, L. “Abstraktsionizm.” In the collection Modernizm. Moscow, 1973, Pages 130–38.
Seuphor, M. Piet Mondrian: Life and Work. Amsterdam, 1957.