Amersfoort, Netherlands, March 7th 1872. Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan is born into a strict Protestant family. His father is a Calvinist schoolmaster, his uncle a landscape painter. He starts by painting windmills, farms and chrysanthemums in a very classical Dutch realist tradition. For thirty-six years, he does landscape. Nothing in that first period announces what is coming. Then in 1908 he discovers, at an exhibition in Amsterdam, the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque. At 36, he flips. He leaves for Paris in 1911, drops a letter from his name (a single "a", Mondrian, to sound more international), settles on rue du Départ near Montparnasse, and starts everything from scratch.

Four years later, he goes back to the Netherlands for the summer holidays of 1914. The First World War breaks out, he is stuck. For the next four years, with the painter Theo van Doesburg and a few others, he invents "Neoplasticism". The movement gathers around the magazine De Stijl, founded in 1917. The program is radical: drop figurative representation, keep only horizontal and vertical straight lines, keep only the three primary colors (red, yellow, blue) plus the three non-colors (black, white, gray). No diagonals, no curves, no blends. That is it. Mondrian will hold that minimal grammar until his death twenty-five years later.

De Stijl, Bauhaus, and the spread

De Stijl does not stay Dutch for long. Theo van Doesburg, from 1922 on, travels between Weimar, Berlin and Paris to spread Neoplasticism. He teaches at the Bauhaus for a year, 1922-1923, as a visiting professor. He directly influences Walter Gropius on typography and architecture. He is the one who pushes the Bauhaus toward the formal rigor of the Dessau years (1925-1932), at the expense of Johannes Itten's more mystical sensibility. Van Doesburg dies prematurely in 1931 in Davos. Mondrian stays in Paris until 1938, then flees to London ahead of the war, then to New York in 1940, where he lives until his death in February 1944.

The mature compositions (1921-1944) all follow the same protocol. Mondrian starts by drawing with a ruler a black grid on a white ground, balanced but asymmetrical. He then sets a few colored patches in some cells, never in all. White stays majority. Red is more present than yellow and blue, because it pushes forward. Blue recedes, yellow holds the middle. Each composition is a search for a dynamic balance between unequal forces. Mondrian worked slowly, sometimes six months on a canvas, going over the black lines in several coats to make them more matte. In his rue du Départ studio, which Marcel Duchamp visited several times, walls were entirely painted in red and yellow rectangles, an extension of the painting.

Broadway Boogie Woogie, endgame

1942-1943. Mondrian, settled for two years in a small studio on First Avenue in Manhattan, paints Broadway Boogie Woogie. The canvas measures 127 by 127 centimeters. For the first time in thirty years, he drops the black lines. In their place, bands of small yellow, red, blue and gray rectangles that flicker like the neon signs of Times Square. He has just discovered boogie-woogie in the jazz clubs of Harlem (at 71, he goes dancing every Saturday night, telling his friends he has never felt such energy). The work is shown at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery in March 1943, immediately bought by the Museum of Modern Art where it still is. He starts straight away on Victory Boogie Woogie, more ambitious still, and leaves it unfinished. He dies of pneumonia on February 1st 1944, at 71.

"Art is higher than nature," Mondrian wrote in 1925. "It only is, on condition that men have become higher than nature."

Living with a Mondrian

A Mondrian, or a neoplastic tribute, calls for a white wall and a quiet room. That is almost the only rule. The compositions tolerate neither cluttered decor, nor colored walls, nor the proximity of another strong work. One piece, isolated, on a clear wall. The frame: a very thin matte black to echo the black line of the composition, or a very pale oak to add warmth without interfering. Avoid white: a white frame disappears into the composition and the work floats. Size matters. Below 50 by 50 centimeters, geometric rigor loses its punch. From 70 by 70 on, the work takes the measure of the wall and becomes the central element of the room. Mondrian often painted in square format, which calls for a square or very clear wall.

Mixing with other works is delicate. A Mondrian dialogues well with a Bauhaus (Kandinsky, Klee, Albers) or a Russian Constructivist (Rodchenko, El Lissitzky). It dialogues poorly with an Art Nouveau poster, an Art Deco travel poster or a photograph. To build a modernist-inspired wall, stay within the geometric 1920-1960 family: a Mondrian, an Albers, a Vasarely, a Bauhaus. Identical frames, regular spacing, a very white wall. The room then becomes a small gallery.

Three threads

  • A classic neoplastic composition (red, yellow, blue, black on a white ground). Square format, pale oak frame, white wall.
  • A 1923-1930 geometric Bauhaus poster from the same formal family. See our geometric Bauhaus collection.
  • A contemporary abstract composition inspired by Neoplasticism. The language still works in today's decor, as long as it stays in the strict palette.

At Montmartre Poster, tributes to Neoplasticism and geometric abstraction live in the modern abstract collection and in the geometric Bauhaus collection. To go deeper into the lineage that runs from Mondrian to the Bauhaus and then to the Swiss grammar of the 1950s, see our article The Bauhaus, when the workshop changed the world.