The Unknown Piet Mondrian – Perspectives from The Artist’s Road

The Unknown Piet Mondrian

Perspectives from The Artist’s Road

Mill in Sunlight     1905     Piet Mondrian

   In September, 2019, Ann and I were in Paris following a successful painting workshop that we had organized and taught in St. Rémy. Taking some well-earned time off to relax in the City of Light, we decided to visit the wonderful collection of Monet’s paintings which the artist had left to his son, Michel. These were his favorite works which he did not sell, and which Michel subsequently left to the Musée Marmottan Monet. The museum is located in the leafy suburb of Passy and holds the world’s largest collection of Monet’s work anywhere.

   Upon arriving at the museum, we were pleasantly surprised to find another exhibition there on a different floor. It contained 33 rare early works from 1891 to 1921, by Piet Mondrian, titled “Mondrian Figuratif”. Beautiful, atmospheric landscapes greeted us at the entrance to the exhibition and told us immediately that we were in for a pleasant surprise. Like many students of art history, we were familiar with the flat, highly abstract, primary colors of Mondrian’s later works. It was a revelation to see his history in painting, his knowledge of the classical techniques of the Dutch Hague School, his explorations into figurative, still life and landscape works, and his involvement with the most important art movements of the day—The Fauves, Divisionists, Cubists and others. Through this exhibition, we gained valuable insight and respect for who he was and how his work evolved into the abstract style for which he is primarily known today. As we talked about it, we realized that this is a common issue for all artists and a common failure of text book art histories. This rare exhibition sought to correct some of those omissions and expand our knowledge of the history of modern painting. These works represented only half of the private collection of Salomon Slijper, a Dutch diamond merchant who was a main supporter of Mondrian’s early work. Some of these paintings are now so fragile that they will never be on loan again. Exhibitions like this are so valuable, if not essential, to educate us in the larger picture of artist’s lives, work and our shared cultural artistic inheritance.

View of Winterswijk     1898-99     Piet Mondrian

Woods near Oele     1908     Piet Mondrian

   “His oeuvre cannot be defined as a direct transition from figuration to abstraction or from black and white to colour. On the contrary, naturalism remained a constant in Mondrian’s work, raising him to the rank—which is an unknown and yet important fact—of a great master of twentieth-century figurative painting”. From Musée Marmottan, September 2019.

Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue
1921     Piet Mondrian