Mondrian’s (D)evolution

Piet Mondrian: a name associated with straight lines and primary colors, whose famous compositions many would consider as the epitome of abstract art. Today we can buy Mondrian furniture, tablecloths, T-shirts – you name it. He’s widely considered one of the most important somewhat contemporary painters in the Dutch tradition. But he didn’t always work with the vigorous control and machine-like technique of his later years, which has been brought to attention by the Amsterdam Museum’s current exhibition of the artist’s early work.

 

Mondrian had his beginnings in the Impressionist era, resulting in paintings that could be likened to Van Gogh or Cezanne. His colors were bold, his strokes gestural – yet even here we can see a kind of foreshadowing in his stress on vertical and horizontal lines that segment the representational composition, as well as the use of primary colors.

But he didn’t focus on integrated landscapes for very long, quickly turning to the singular tree for inspiration. Here the use of color is still based on dramatic contrast between complementaries like blue and orange, and the negative space of the tree becomes the central motif of this time period for the artist.

Even without bold colors, we can see that ordered segmentation of space within the web of branches is clearly what drives each painting. These interior pockets begin to look geometricized, imposing what is still clearly a tree onto a suggested framework that shows the beginnings of a grid-like format.

And that’s about the last we see of real trees from Mondrian. His work continues to evolve (or devolve, depending on your point of view) by way of breaking down the composition into shapes that look more and more geometric. Curved, black lines suggesting organic form delineate most of these color swatches, but those on the outskirts of the canvas are allowed to bleed and blend into one another.

It is here that any semblance to natural representation is lost, and Mondrian’s paintings begin to look decidedly abstract. The majority of lines have been straightened out, and each canvas is made up of variations on two or three central colors. Yet these compositions are still dynamic, coming into focus towards the center of the almost-grid, and a sense of space is apparent.

The last few changes that had to occur before he’d reach the most “Mondrian-esque” paintings happen surprisingly slowly. First was the introduction of a complete grid made up of only vertical and horizontal lines containing quadrilaterals in solid colors:

Followed by the disappearance of any color besides red, blue, yellow, black, white, and grey.

This change was further constricted by the use of primary colors for squares, black for the lines that separated them, and white for seemingly “empty” boxes in the composition. It is here that Mondrian reaches his most well known form in the search for the perfect abstraction.

Further development resulted in more lines and boxes of color that didn’t have to be surrounded by black.

The last painting created by the artist marked a proportionally huge jump in this fundamental structure that had become his bread and butter. The black lines that had functioned as the spine of each painting were finally omitted in favor of colors differentiated only by the contrast between adjacent squares.

And thus, we have the evolution from natural representation to purely abstract form, demonstrated by a collection of paintings that represent the real evolution of Mondrian’s perception. While it can be said that his work grew more visually simple as his ideas developed, it was a necessary transition as well as the only path to painting accurate generalities rather than specific gestures. By breaking down each composition into its most basic elements of line and color, Mondrian strove to make work that would be understood by everyone, whether they knew why they “got it” or not. This evolution was also representative of his ideas that modern man would become more and more disconnected from nature, something as obvious in today’s society as it was in his paintings. Regardless of at what stage his work was most interesting to look at, it must be said that he clearly wasn’t wrong in his understanding of simplification as abstraction, nor of the logical connections that take place inside the human mind.