Mondrian boiled painting down to red, yellow, blue, and grid
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian, lived from 7 March 1872 to 1 February 1944 and helped found De Stijl with Theo van Doesburg. Neo-Plasticism limited him to primary colors, black lines, and white—an austere hunt for universal beauty after Cubism and theosophy rewired his eye.
Mondrian grew up surrounded by drawing. His father, head teacher at a primary school in Winterswijk, was a qualified drawing instructor, and his uncle Frits, a pupil of the Hague School painter Willem Maris, took the boy sketching along the river Gein. After a strict Protestant upbringing he entered Amsterdam's Academy for Fine Art in 1892, already qualified to teach. His early landscapes of windmills, fields and rivers followed the Hague School before moving through other styles, and a series from 1905 to 1908 of hazy trees and houses mirrored in still water began to stress form over subject. Evening, a tree at dusk painted in 1908, is his earliest picture built mainly on red, yellow and blue.
Spiritual ideas steered him. He took up Helena Blavatsky's theosophy in 1908 and joined the Dutch Theosophical Society in 1909, and Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy also shaped his aims. The Cubist show at Amsterdam's Moderne Kunstkring in 1911 hit him hard: two versions of Still Life with Ginger Pot show objects dissolving into circles, triangles and rectangles between 1911 and 1912. That year he moved to Paris and dropped an a from Mondriaan to mark his break with home, and paintings such as The Sea filled with interlocking planes.
Visiting the Netherlands when war broke out in 1914, he was stuck there until the end, and at the Laren artists' colony he got to know Theo van Doesburg, his future partner in founding De Stijl, and Bart van der Leck. Works like Composition 10 in Black and White of 1915 led to Neoplasticism, restricted to the three primary colours, black, white and grey, and horizontal and vertical lines. He set out the theory in twelve instalments in 1917 and 1918, having written in 1914 that he built lines and colours on a flat surface to express universal beauty.
Source: Piet Mondrian
