Dutch Painter

Piet Mondrian was a painter who went to Paris in 1911 and abandoned his realistic landscapes for Cubist ones. In 1914 he returned toHolland and had six essays published in the first number of De Stijl (1917-18), but he lived in Paris 1919-38, then in London. He went to New York in 1940, where he exerted great influence on the development of the New York School.

His form of abstraction was a peculiarly rigorous one known as Neo-Plasticism, which consists principally of restricting forms to purely geometrical shapes, set at right angles to the horizontal or vertical axes and coloured in three primary colours, and white, black, or grey.

He came from a Calvinist background (although, like Kandinsky, he was influenced by Theosophy). The only enlivening touch he permitted himself was in his titles - Boogie-Woogie, for example (he was a jazz enthusiast). As might be expected, he was a prolific writer (often in De Stijl) and his Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (1937) summarizes his theories: his collected writings were published in London in 1987.

There are early works in the Hague and most museums of modern art have examples of his geometrical abstractions.

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