Piet Mondrian

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan 1872-1944

7/3/1872 - Born in Amersfoort, Utrecht (Holland).
Dutch pioneer of abstract art, who developed from early landscape pictures to geometric abstract works of a most rigorous kind.

Studied painting at the Amsterdam Academy 1892-4 and again, part-time, 1896-7.
Friendship with the painter Simon Mans and painted landscapes in the Hague School tradition. Began to work in a more vividly coloured and sometimes pointillist style in 1908, joined the Theosophic Organisation in 1909 and made some works of a Symbolist character. First one-man exhibition with C.R.H. Spoor and Jan Sluyters at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1909.

Lived in Paris 1912-14; was influenced by Cubism, which he carried to the point of abstraction.
Returned to Holland in 1914 and step by step evolved a more simplified abstract style which he called Neo-Plasticism, restricted to the three primary colours and to a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines on a white ground; associated with van Doesburg in the de Stijl movement 1917-25.

Lived 1919-38 in Paris where he joined the group Abstraction-Création in 1931.
Moved to London 1938-40, living near Gabo and Ben Nicholson, then in 1940 to New York where he started to develop a more colourful style, with coloured lines and syncopated rhythms.

1944 - Died in New York.

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