Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) – On the occasion of the 150th birthday of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection is showing the Dutch painter from a little-known side. From Saturday, the Landesgalerie in Düsseldorf will be presenting 90 works in the exhibition “Mondrian. Evolution” (until February 12, 2023) showing Mondrian’s remarkable path from the early naturalistic painter to his late masterpieces of abstraction.
Mondrian is best known for his strict geometric compositions of rectangular black lines, white areas and the primary colors blue, red and yellow. In his early phase, however, he was a landscape painter and influenced, for example, by Vincent van Gogh. Mondrian often staged mills, lighthouses or farms in surprising colors.
In 1911 Mondrian encountered the cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in Paris. These revolutionary images made a huge impression on the then almost 40-year-old, and as a result he radically reduced his color palette. Mondrian distanced himself more and more from representational motifs and developed an artistic language of surfaces and strict lines that, according to the exhibition organizers, seem like “shorthand abbreviations of reality”.
The exhibition is a cooperation between the Kunstsammlung NRW, the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland, where it was on view this summer, and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
