Piet Mondrian. Evolution

About

The world-renowned painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) is famous for his astringent, geometric compositions in black and white with selected primary colour fields in red, blue or yellow. Yet it is not commonly known that the Dutchman opted to paint landscapes and other figurative motifs in his early years as an artist and often staged them with a surprising palette of colours. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen delineates Mondrian's artistic path from his early endeavours in painting to his wholly abstract works and traces the connections between the different groups of paintings.

From the beginning of his career as an artist, Mondrian was in search of the ideal composition. In his view, this comprised the perfect balance of all pictorial elements. Mondrian readily came across motifs – windmills, lighthouses, the dunes by the sea and the water, in which farms and rows of trees were reflected – in his homeland. This selection of paintings provides an insight into his work in the studio and his individual experimentation with colours and forms with the aid of Cubist stylistic elements, before turning to pure abstraction at the beginning of the 1920s.

The exhibition is courtesy of the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in conjunction with the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.