Cubist period in Paris of Piet Mondrian

Concurrent with the spiritual influence of theosophy was Mondrian’s exposure to new visual ideas. Dutch artists were increasingly aware of the radical work of Paul Cézanne and of the Cubist painters. The Dutch avant-garde began to call for new standards in their national art that would incorporate such trends and move beyond traditional landscape painting. Active in avant-garde circles, Mondrian was very influenced by these ideas. In 1911 he saw for the first time the early Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. He was profoundly impressed, so much so that early in 1912 he moved to Paris, where he settled in the Montparnasse district.

Almost immediately he began to adapt the precepts of Cubism to his own use, as evidenced in two versions of Still Life with Gingerpot, done during the winter months of 1911–12. In the first version, the objects are rendered as recognizable forms from everyday life; in the second, he transformed the same objects into compositional structures, taking his drive toward abstraction further than he ever had before. Mondrian’s Cubist period lasted from 1912 to 1917. His compositions of trees, architectural facades, and scaffoldings during this period are proof of his urge to reduce individual forms to a general formula. Mondrian kept somewhat within the boundaries of Cubism by utilizing the Cubists’ limited colour palette of ochre, brown, and gray, so as not to distract from form, and by painting large blocks of colour. He also observed the Cubist scheme of composition, in which geometric divisions are used and the painting gravitates toward a central focus, leaving the corners of the canvas almost untouched; the result of this scheme was his series of oval compositions. But in an attempt to reduce the elements of his composition even further, Mondrian avoided curved lines and diagonal accents and increasingly used only vertical and horizontal lines. He went beyond Analytical Cubism’s tendency to break individual objects into their component parts by instead striving for a vision of reality that surpassed depicting the individual object altogether: from 1913 onward his style began its evolution toward total abstraction.

In the summer of 1914 Mondrian returned to the Netherlands to visit his father, who was seriously ill, and the outbreak of World War I prevented him from returning to Paris. He settled at Laren, where he became acquainted with M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, a theosophical philosopher whose works on the symbolical meaning of lines and on the mathematical construction of the universe had a decisive influence on Mondrian’s vision of painting. In his work, the artist had long been moving toward seeing the canvas as a site of spiritual awakening for the viewer; this achieved theosophy’s goal of bringing about a state of heightened consciousness during the experience of everyday life. With the ideas of Schoenmaekers, he now had a distinct set of graphic rules, closely related to his own developing formal vocabulary, through which he could achieve this goal of merging art and life. These discoveries pushed his Cubist style to its extreme limits, particularly in his painting of the church at Domburg and in a new theme, captured in a series of works known as Pier and Ocean. The ultimate version of this theme, completed in 1917 and shown at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, marks the final stage of his Cubist style: an oval painting composed of black vertical and horizontal line fragments on a white background.

The birth of De Stijl

Continuing these radical developments, in 1917 Mondrian and three other painters—Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck, and Vilmos Huszar—founded the art periodical and the movement of De Stijl. The group advocated the complete rejection of visually perceived reality as subject matter and the restriction of a pictorial language to its most basic elements of the straight line, primary colours, and the neutrals of black, white, and gray. In the movement’s journal, De Stijl, Mondrian essentially laid out all his visual theories; because he contributed so extensively to the first issues of the journal, the early style of De Stijl has become synonymous with his own (in later years the movement was more a reflection of the ideas of van Doesburg, the true leader of the movement). The scope of this new style of line and colour, for which Mondrian coined the name neoplasticism, was to free the work of art from representing a momentary visual perception and from being guided by the personal temperament of the artist. The vision that Mondrian had moved toward for so long now seemed to be within reach: he could now render “a true vision of reality” in his painting, which meant deriving a composition not from a fragment of reality but rather from an overall abstract view of the harmony of the universe. A painting no longer had to begin from an abstracted view of nature; rather, a painting could emerge out of purely abstract rules of geometry and colour, since he found that this was the most effective language through which to convey his spiritual message.

Mondrian’s first neoplastic paintings were composed of rectangles in soft hues of primary colours painted on a white background with no use of line. His compositions were based on colour and appear to expand over the borders of the canvas into space beyond the picture. In 1918 he reintroduced lines into his painting, linking the colour planes to one another and to the background by a series of black vertical and horizontal strips, thus creating rectangles of colour or noncolour. In 1918 and 1919 he executed a series of rhomboid compositions, subdivided into a pattern of regular squares differentiated by thick black lines and by soft hues of ochre, gray, and rose. Also in 1919, he created two versions of a checkerboard composition, one in dark and one in light colours, in which the difference of the hues transforms this common pattern into a rhythmic sequence of squares, which play off each other to suggest vibrancy and movement. The titles of his works reflect this move to pure abstraction: whereas his earlier work had titles invoking the abstracted elements of nature or architecture depicted, his work during this period generally had titles such as Composition with Gray, Red, Yellow, and Black (c. 1920–26) and Diagonal Composition (1921). He returned to Paris in 1919, but he retained his close collaboration with De Stijl. By publishing his theories in the booklet Le Néo-plasticisme in Paris in 1920, Mondrian began to spread his ideas throughout Europe.