Later years of Piet Mondrian

Some of Mondrian’s friends organized an exhibition of his works at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on the occasion of his 50th birthday. It was a retrospective progression of his paintings, tracing the path from his beginnings in the Dutch traditional style to his abstract paintings, firmly establishing the artist’s pivotal role in the international art world’s move toward abstraction. He had reached his goal, but he did not stand still: he continued to explore the relationship between lines and blocks of colour, achieving an ever-increasing purity in his paintings.

Although he did not exhibit frequently and rarely held a one-man show, in the early 1930s he became affiliated with Cercle et Carré and with Abstraction-Création, both of which were influential international groups of artists who promoted and exhibited abstract art. In 1934 he met the American artist Harry Holtzman and the English painter Ben Nicholson. Nicholson urged him to publish his essay “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art,” Mondrian’s first essay in English, in the international publication Circle, of which Nicholson was coeditor. In this way, Mondrian’s ideas continued to gain an even broader audience. When Mondrian decided to leave Paris in 1938, under the shadow of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Adolf Hitler, he was welcomed in London by members of the Circle group. For two years he worked and lived in a London suburb, but the bombardment of the city forced him to flee to New York City in 1940, where he was welcomed by Holtzman, the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, art critic and museum director James Johnson Sweeney, and other members of the American artistic vanguard.

There, Mondrian’s style entered its last phase. Throughout the 1930s, Mondrian’s work had become increasingly severe. Inspired by his regained freedom, New York City’s pulsating life, and the new rhythms of American music, after 1940 he broke away first from the austere patterns of black lines, replacing them with coloured bands. Then, in place of the continuous flow of these bands, he substituted a series of small rectangles that coalesced into a rhythmic flow of colourful vertical and horizontal lines. His late masterpieces—New York City I and Broadway Boogie Woogie, exhibited in 1943–44, in his first personal exhibition in more than two decades—express this new vivacity through the autonomous, joyous movement of colour blocks. Buoyed by his hope for a better future, Mondrian started his Victory Boogie Woogie in 1942; it remained unfinished when he succumbed to pneumonia in 1944.

Legacy

The consistent development of Mondrian’s art toward complete abstraction was an outstanding feat in the history of modern art, and his work foreshadowed the rise of abstract art in the 1940s and ’50s. But his art goes beyond merely aesthetic considerations: his search for harmony through his painting has an ethical significance. Rooted in a strict puritan tradition of Dutch Calvinism and inspired by his theosophical beliefs, he continually strove for purity during his long career, a purity best explained by the double meaning of the Dutch word schoon, which means both “clean” and “beautiful.” Mondrian chose the strict and rigid language of straight line and pure colour to produce first of all an extreme purity, and on another level, a Utopia of superb clarity and force. When, in 1920, Mondrian dedicated Le Néo-plasticisme to “future men,” his dedication implied that art can be a guide to humanity, that it can move beyond depicting the casual, arbitrary facts of everyday appearance and substitute in its place a new, harmonious view of life.