Piet Mondrian

Mondrian died in New York in 1944 because of pneumonia. He was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Mondrian was born in Amersfoort, Netherlands, to Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan. His father was a Head Teacher at a local school; he was also a qualified drawing teacher and was responsible in initiating his son into the world of art.

Mondrian attended the Academy for Fine Art, Amsterdam, in 1892 and later became a Primary Education teacher while practicing painting side by side. There are number of his paintings that are displayed in the Gemeente museum, Hauge, belonging to this period.

Mondrian got himself deeply involved in the theosophical movement in 1908, launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and, in the following year, he joined the Dutch branch of the Theosophical Society. All of this influenced his paintings very much.

The Moderne Kunstkring exhibition of Cubism, Amsterdam in 1911 also made a deep impact on his paintings. His quest to find artistic simplification is clear with the two versions of his famous painting ‘Still Life with Ginger Pot’.

In 1911, he went to settle in Paris and also changed his name from ‘Mondriaan’ to ‘Mondrian’. During this time, his work also showed some influence of painters like, Picasso and Georges Braque.

Mondrian treated his art and paintings as his ultimate spiritual detections and in 1913, he increasingly started to merge his artistic pursuits and his theosophical studies into a theory, which symbolized his ultimate split from the representational painting.

In 1914, he visited The Netherlands but around this time the tension because of the impending World War I was brewing up, which forced him to stay. During this time he started a journal ‘De Stijl’ with Van Doesburg.

Mondrian evolved in his artistry over the years; he started with representational paintings but influenced with the De Stijl movement, he evolved into a non-representational painter—a form of art that he named neoplasticism and majorly contributed to it.