Stick, stick, cucumber, it turned out... an original and absurdly simplified style Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan. He deliberately created his masterpieces from elementary lines and shapes. As you know, everything ingenious is simple, and this technique made the artist’s style recognizable at first sight.

Mondrian is best known for his work in the early 1920s, where he simplified all forms to horizontal and vertical lines. The artist filled the resulting rectangles with the main colors of the palette. Pete presented his sense of the world in the form of opposites: vertical and horizontal, plus and minus, dynamics and statics, masculine and feminine.

The asymmetrical balance of his figures symbolizes the unity and mutual complementarity of universal forces. The result is complete abstraction. This series of paintings shocked the art world so much that attempts to imitate Mondrian’s genius are still found today - in fashion, architecture, topography and design.

The paradoxical simplicity of Mondrian's lines and images became the main idea of ​​the Dutch De Stijl movement. The philosophy of this association consisted of combining art and reality. Thus, a new universal language of creativity was born, understandable to everyone.

Here are the most famous allusions to his work: in the 30s, French fashion designer Lola Prusac created a line of suitcases and bags with inserts of red, blue and yellow leather squares. And in 1965, Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent presented the famous “Mondrian” dresses - without collar and sleeves, made of knitted fabric, with decor in the form of “quotes” from the paintings of the abstract artist.

In search of a direction that was comfortable for himself, Pete went through the stages of Luminism and Cubism. And finally, neoplasticism is born - its own branch of abstract art. Together with other artists from De Stijl, Mondrian promoted an all-consuming abstraction with limited color freedom. Their association in every possible way promoted to the world the idea of ​​a utopian style, consisting of flat forms and dynamic tension in the works. Much later, in the 60s, this idea was picked up by minimalists, choosing clear lines and limited choice of colors.

Mondrian's family was unimaginably far from art. Pete's father, the director of a local school, barely made ends meet, trying to feed the future great artist, two more sons, a daughter and his wife, who was in poor health. But, despite this, the family treated the child’s talent with understanding, and at the age of twenty, Pete moved from Amersfoort to Amsterdam, where his studies at the Academy of Arts began.

At the age of twenty-five, Mondrian had to return to life for almost a year. parents' house- the young artist suffered severe health damage during a riotous vacation and was forced to fight pneumonia. Piet became isolated, but the solitude bore fruit: during this time he painted a series of naturalistic landscapes of Winterswijk. Of course, they have nothing in common with the abstract paintings that would later bring him fame. The early Mondrian adhered to conservative traditions, but even then a clearly expressed personal style was visible in his works. He even painted people as static, often using a ruler.

This feature brought him a lot of suffering. Mondrian tried twice to receive a prestigious Rome scholarship, but failed both times. Moreover, he only achieved a devastating review of his work. Critics accused the artist of lacking talent and skill and the inability to depict people alive. This is partly how it was - the background and characters did not fit well with each other, the lifeless silhouettes seemed to be glued to the canvas.

The first impetus for abstraction was Mondrian's entry into the Dutch Theosophical Society. The artist clearly liked mysticism, but he always strived to reproduce the spiritual more realistically. That is why in no case should he be classified as a Theosophist.

But the epicenter of change occurred in 1911. It was he who became the most important in Mondrian’s career. The artist visited an exhibition of contemporary art in Amsterdam, where he was deeply impressed by the works of the Cubists and. Immediately after this, Mordrian moved to France and radically changed his attitude towards creativity. He began working in the genre of high cubism and surpassed his predecessors. Pete refused to depict objects and natural elements. His cubism is ascetic, objectless, almost colorless. With the help of geometry, Mondrian tried to explore the laws of the universe and convey them through painting.

Pete's most controversial work was a painting called Victory Boogie-Woogie, painted in 1944.

Today it is considered the embodiment of neo-plasticism and signature Mondrian style. While working on it, the artist fell ill with pneumonia and died without completing what he started. However, it is believed that it is “Victory” that conveys the author’s innermost dreams and aspirations. This is the crown of his creation.

Over the seventy years of his life, Mondrian changed the direction of his work several times, moved a lot - Holland, France, England, America - and showed his works at his only exhibition in New York shortly before his death. Today the artist is unanimously recognized as the founding father of abstract art. Pete's work is highly respected by researchers. But its influence on world culture goes far beyond visual arts and covers all types creative activity modernity.

Peter Cornelis Mondrian, "Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue"

Piet Mondrian is one of the largest ideologists of abstract art, the creator of “pure” geometric painting, which embodied the Dutch painter and thinker’s idea of ​​objective art, freed from subjectivity and designed to convey the unique and completely harmonious fundamental principle of everything.

The beginning of Mondrian's creative activity is associated with realistic landscapes, drawn to the emotionality of Van Gogh. Already on early stages Mondrian's creativity strove for simple compositions using plain, clear color range. Gradually he begins to move away from the traditional approach to schematizing objects, moving more and more to geometric abstraction.

Mondrian's creative vision was greatly influenced by the years spent in Paris, where the beginning of the 20th century. gave birth to abstract painting. Pure geometric forms most fully reflect the artist’s vision of the essence of things. Several works executed in the style of analytical cubism were included in his “Paris series”. Very characteristic in this sense is a series of works executed in 1910-1911, in which the artist’s brush gradually loses its visible form, turning into a structure of several geometric elements.

The years of the First World War, spent by Mondrian in his homeland, Holland, lead him to a completely different direction in painting. The artist comes to the conclusion that at the basis of all things lies a certain ideal harmony, a universal order on which the construction of this world is based. Trying to get away from the visible, denaturalizing the surrounding space on the canvas, the artist reveals this ideal harmony. From Mondrian’s point of view, the desired essence is hidden in ideal geometric forms, therefore his painting, like the works of his followers, is limited to the use of primary geometric elements - a straight line and right angle. The color scheme of the works consists of only four colors - black, red, yellow and blue.

Next, Mondrian begins to seek the balance of those same primary elements, discovering symmetry through a calculated combination of color and shapes. Colored polygons, coordinated according to the master’s perceived routine, make up his “Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue.” The polygons are separated from each other by straight black lines, while the “coloring” itself has the character of a fill in the drawing, thus sweeping aside any presence of the artist’s personality in the picture. This is emphasized by the absence of the title of the canvas as such. It is noteworthy that his works differed from each other only in numbering.

Search for proportion and balance geometric shapes in the “primary” colors soon found its immediate practical use in architecture and everyday life, the arrangement of colored planes was practiced at the beginning of the century applied arts. Neoplasticism, or rectangular painting, the foundations of which were laid and theoretically substantiated by Mondrian, became very widespread. Thus, in 1917, the magazine “De Stijl” was created, which developed under the leadership of Mondrian himself and prominent Dutch architects who preached the ideas of a new direction in art. The magazine was published for 14 years, during which time neoplasticism turned into an independent, widely known and generally accepted movement.

As a matter of fact, it was the magazine that was designed to convey to wide range those interested in painting, Mondrian's ideas. In general, his painting is not so much a paradoxical direction in art as a whole worldview. Simplification and depersonalization, cultivated by Mondrian, should, according to the principle of absolute harmony, reorganize this world, leading it away from contradictions in an illusory way.

Mondrian himself said that the sensory world only dooms humanity to endless suffering, in which every person is locked due to the predominance of subjectivity and the contradictory nature of his nature over pure thinking. People are doomed to suffer until they are able to look differently at the world around and within themselves, abandoning external materiality. Civilization, according to Mondrian, helps a person to abstract from the “natural form”, see the true, and shift the material shell to the democratic organization of society. The new art is designed to help people change their minds - learn to see higher forms relations with the world.

In 1926, Mondrian formulated 5 basic instructions to neoplastic artists, which they should rely on in their work. Strictly speaking, these are the 5 commandments of the New Life religion, which Mondrian preached throughout his life. The rejection of the sensory, the mathematical replacement of all kinds of emotional and subjective things were supposed to transform the imperfect world and save it from suffering.

In 1938, Mondrian came to London, but two years of work (paintings collected in his workshop) were destroyed during one of the Nazi bombings. Having moved to New York, he begins to feel the pulse of a completely different rhythm of life. Boogie-woogie, Broadway, jungle - all this is reflected in the abstract geometry of the master.

Piet Mondrian was born in the small Dutch town of Amersfoort. Mondrian’s father, the director of a local school, could not provide for his family, but he was sensitive to his son’s talent, and at the age of 20 Mondrian left to study in Amsterdam.

Pieter Cornelis (Piet) Mondrian (March 7, 1872, Amersfoort, Netherlands - February 1, 1944, New York) - Dutch artist, who, simultaneously with Kandinsky and Malevich, laid the foundation abstract painting.

Piet Mondrian was born in the small Dutch town of Amersfoort. Mondrian’s father, the director of a local school, could not provide for his family, but he was sensitive to his son’s talent, and at the age of 20 Mondrian left to study in Amsterdam.

Piet Mondrian was born in the small Dutch town of Amersfoort. Mondrian’s father, the director of a local school, could not provide for his family, but he was sensitive to his son’s talent, and at the age of 20 Mondrian left to study in Amsterdam.

Started as an art teacher in primary school, early works- landscapes of Holland in the spirit of impressionism. I became interested in the theosophy of H. P. Blavatsky. He deeply embraced the quest of Cubism at the Cubist Exhibition in Amsterdam (1911). In 1912 he moved to Paris and, as a sign of the beginning of a new life, changed his surname to “Mondrian”.

He spent the years of the First World War in his homeland, in 1915 he became close to the artist Theo van Doesburg, and together with him founded the “Style” movement (Dutch: De Stijl) and the art magazine of the same name. The magazine became the organ of neoplasticism - the utopia of a new plastic culture as the utmost consciousness in the scrupulous transmission of generalized beauty and truth using the most ascetic means, basic, primary colorful tones, lines, forms.

Mondrian consistently developed this non-figurative direction in France, where he lived from 1919 to 1938, then in Great Britain, and from 1940 in the USA.

During the American period of his work, Mondrian tried to adapt the principles of neoplasticism to convey dynamic effects (“Boogie-Woogie on Broadway”).

Mondrian died of pneumonia on February 1, 1944 and was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

The design of Mondrian's New York studio, in which he worked for only a few months and which was carefully recreated by his friends and followers on photo and film, became, as it were, last job masters, these “Murals” were shown at exhibitions in New York, London, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and Berlin. Mondrian's Paris apartment, his pipe and glasses are depicted in the minimalist photographs of Andre Kertesz (1926), which became emblematic of modern photography.

Mondrian called for the “denaturalization” of art, the abandonment of natural forms and the transition to pure abstraction. Beginning in 1913, Mondrian's paintings developed toward abstract matrices consisting of black horizontal and vertical lines. Gradually, the arrangement of lines on the canvas was ordered to such an extent that they began to look like regular grids with cells. The cells were painted with primary colors, that is, red, blue and yellow. Thus, the structure of the painting was formed by the dichotomies color - non-color, vertical - horizontal, large surface - small surface, the unity of which was supposed to symbolize the balance of forces in the harmony of the universe. Despite the extreme limitations of visual means, Mondrian’s work had a great influence on his contemporaries and gave rise to new directions in painting and graphics.

Piet Mondrian, one of the founders of the Dutch movement / De Stijl. Mondrian brought purity and lightness of lines, abstraction of images and a new philosophy of combining art and the world to De Stijl and implemented it in his creative practice. He radically simplified all the elements of his paintings to reflect how he saw the spiritual order underlying the visible world. This simplification created a clear, universal language and aesthetic image of his paintings. In his most famous paintings from the 1920s, Mondrian simplified the forms to horizontal and vertical lines forming rectangles and the color palette to minimal basics, reducing perception outside world to pure abstraction.

His use of asymmetrical balance and minimal imagery was crucial in the development of modern art, and his iconic abstract works influence design and culture to this day.

Key Ideas

— The theorist and writer Mondrian believed that art reflects the fundamental spirituality of nature. In order to reveal the essence of mystical energy in the balance of the forces of nature and the surrounding world, he simplified the subjects of the paintings to the simplest, basic elements.

— Mondrian decided to form their ideas about the world in basic elements representing the two main forces of the world: vertical and horizontal lines, positive and negative, dynamic and static, male and female. The dynamic balance in his compositions reflects the world with the balance of universal forces.

-With his creativity and conceptual approach to displaying the world, Mondrian changes the concept of abstraction for all modern art. The influence of modern artistic directions in his paintings: in a logical order, development passes through Luminism, Impressionism, and, most importantly, Cubism.

-Mondrian and the De Stijl artists advocated an all-consuming abstraction with a pared-down color palette to express a utopian ideal of harmony in the unification of all the arts. Mondrian believed that his vision of modern art would bridge cultural divides and become a new language based on simple colors, flat forms, and dynamic tension in canvases.

— Mondrian’s book on Neo-Plastic became one of the key works of abstract art. As a new method of representing modern reality, the book details how to create artistic images using shapes and colors on the surface of the canvas.

Piet Mondrian. Heritage.

The sophistication of Mondrian's abstractions, as well as the utopian ideals of his work, had a huge influence on the development of modern art. His ideas were immediately associated with, especially in aesthetic and simplified lines and colors, and with the Bauhaus ideals in which art was in harmony with all aspects of life. Later, Mondrian's style can be seen in the works of the minimalists of the late 1960s, who chose simplified forms and a pared-down palette. Not only on modern Art influenced by Mondrian's style, the legacy can be seen in all aspects of modern and postmodern culture, from the color scheme of Yves Saint Laurent / Yves Saint Laurent in a “Mondrian” day-dress “, using a neo-plastic style.

before album The White Stripes - De Stijl, 2000,

as well as hotels named "Mondrian" in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

Pieter Cornelis (Pete) Mondrian (Nether. Pieter Cornelis (Piet) Mondriaan, MFA: [ˈpit ˈmɔndrijaːn], since 1911 - mondrian, [ˈmɔndrijɑn]; March 7, 1872 (1872030), Amersfort, Netherlands - February 1, 1944, New orc listen)) is a Dutch artist who, simultaneously with Kandinsky and Malevich, laid the foundation for abstract painting.

Piet Mondrian was born in the small Dutch town of Amersfoort. Mondrian’s father, the director of a local school, could not provide for his family, but he was sensitive to his son’s talent, and at the age of 20 Mondrian left to study in Amsterdam.

He started as an art teacher in a primary school, his early works included landscapes of Holland in the spirit of impressionism. I became interested in the theosophy of H. P. Blavatsky. He deeply embraced the quest of Cubism at the Cubist Exhibition in Amsterdam (1911). In 1912 he moved to Paris and, as a sign of the beginning of a new life, changed his surname to “Mondrian”.

He spent the years of the First World War in his homeland, in 1915 he became close to the artist Theo van Doesburg, and together with him founded the “Style” movement (Dutch De Stijl) and the art magazine of the same name. The magazine became the organ of neoplasticism - the utopia of a new plastic culture as the utmost consciousness in the scrupulous transmission of generalized beauty and truth using the most ascetic means, basic, primary colorful tones, lines, forms.

Mondrian consistently developed this non-figurative direction in France, where he lived from 1919 to 1938, then in Great Britain, and from 1940 in the USA.

During the American period of his work, Mondrian tried to adapt the principles of neoplasticism to convey dynamic effects (“Boogie-Woogie on Broadway”).

Mondrian died of pneumonia on February 1, 1944 and was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

The design of Mondrian’s New York studio, in which he worked for only a few months and which was carefully recreated by his friends and followers on photo and film, became, as it were, the master’s last work; these “Murals” were shown at exhibitions in New York, London, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Berlin. Mondrian's Paris apartment, his pipe and glasses are depicted in the minimalist photographs of Andre Kertesz (1926), which became emblematic of modern photography.

Mondrian called for the “denaturalization” of art, the abandonment of natural forms and the transition to pure abstraction. Beginning in 1913, Mondrian's paintings developed toward abstract matrices consisting of black horizontal and vertical lines. Gradually, the arrangement of lines on the canvas was ordered to such an extent that they began to look like regular grids with cells. The cells were painted with primary colors, that is, red, blue and yellow. Thus, the structure of the painting was formed by the dichotomies color - non-color, vertical - horizontal, large surface - small surface, the unity of which was supposed to symbolize the balance of forces in the harmony of the universe.
Despite the extreme limitations of visual means, Mondrian’s work had a great influence on his contemporaries and gave rise to new directions in painting and graphics.

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