From 14 December 2007 to 30 March 2008 Museum Ludwig will be host to one of the largest and foremost Mondrian Collections in the world. The collection, which is in the keeping of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, charts the artist’s path from his beginnings in Impressionism and Cubism to the founding of De Stijl, and ultimately to his Neo-Plasticism.

With some 80 paintings and drawings, the exhibition gives a fasci-nating insight into the way Piet Mondrian’s work developed, begin-ning with a detailed look at the period before his breakthrough to Geometrical Abstraction, and taking us on to the perfecting of his Neo-Plasticist imagery.

Piet Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticist paintings number among the undisputed icons of Classic Modernism. Even without any concrete knowledge of the painter as person or of his oeuvre, the sight of these black and white rectangular compositions with their coloured fields filled in with primary red, yellow and blue, has become part of a collective aesthetic that goes far beyond the realms of art. This is in no small part due to the frequent use that advertising has made of them. But this abstract imagery is the result of a complex development that few are aware of, and that came about under the influence of a medley of heterogeneous artistic currents at the turn of the 20th century.

Mondrian’s beginnings as a painter reveal their roots in the tradi-tions of Dutch painting, which still held sway in the late 19th century. This is shown in particular by the wealth of landscape paintings with mills, pastures and rivers, which the young artist captured in the Impressionist style of the Hague School. But these works already betray his desire to abandon an art that merely copied natural objects in favour of a deep-seated wish to analyse the subject and think the composition through.

Mondrian’s search for a new, innovative basis for painting and vis-ual expression drew on the emerging currents in the contemporary art scene. His openness to the innovations of the Symbolists, Neo-Impressionists and Expressionists allowed him to disregard the broad ignorance that the Dutch audience showed towards the new developments from France. Mondrian’s curiosity and love of experiment led him to continue purifying his forms and reducing his palette, as is demonstrated by his increasing preoccupation with the primary colours red, yellow and blue.

Yet although the luminous tones of Fauvism, which were reflected above all by the powerful textures in his landscapes and architec-tural motifs, had a lasting influence on him, it was his discovery of the Analytic Cubism of Braque and Picasso that pointed him in the direction of abstractionism. During a stay in Paris in 1912 Mondrian came up with his own style of Cubism, using such familiar motifs as a tree or a building facade. Typical of these compositions are the black contours he painted around the forms, together with a very frugal use of colour.

In 1914 Mondrian described his aim as going beyond formal connec-tions in order to grasp the fundamental principles and essence of painting. He wrote:

“Basically people regard my works as somewhat vague. I create fields of lines and colours on a surface in order to lend plastic expression to a universal form of beauty ... Nature (or the visible) stimulates me... but I want to get as close as possible to the truth, which is why I keep on abstracting until I penetrate the essence of things (although still just their outer being) ... I am sure that if one avoids expressing things unequivocally one ends up expressing the ultimate: the (all-encompassing) truth.”

This exhibition at Museum Ludwig focuses on the extraordinary artistic process Mondrian went through on his way to abstractionism – one that is unparalleled in Modernism. The incomparable collection of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague documents these developments from their beginnings to the late work.

© MUSEUM LUDWIG 2007     Impressum