Piet Mondrian: 15 cool facts

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (Dutch: [ˈpitər kɔrˈneːlɪs ˈmɔndrijaːn]), after 1906 Piet Mondrian (,also US: /- ˈmɔːn-/,Dutch: [pit ˈmɔndrijɑn]; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for creature one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he distorted his artistic management from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a dwindling where his artistic vocabulary was abbreviated to easy geometric elements.

Mondrian’s art was terribly utopian and was concerned following a search for universal values and aesthetics. He proclaimed in 1914: “Art is higher than reality and has no direct savings account to reality. To gain access to the spiritual in art, one will make as Tiny use as realistic of reality, because reality is critical of the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man.” His art, however, always remained rooted in nature.

He was a contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which he co-founded taking into account Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neoplasticism. This was the new ‘pure plastic art’ which he believed was critical in order to create ‘universal beauty’. To reveal this, Mondrian eventually fixed to limit his formal vocabulary to the three primary colors (red, blue and yellow), the three primary values (black, white and gray) and the two primary directions (horizontal and vertical). Mondrian’s dawn in Paris from the Netherlands in 1911 marked the coming on of a grow old of obscure change. He encountered experiments in Cubism and gone the intent of integrating himself within the Parisian futuristic removed an ‘a’ from the Dutch spelling of his name (Mondrian).

Mondrian’s conduct yourself had an gigantic influence upon 20th century art, influencing not single-handedly the course of abstract painting and numerous major styles and art movements (e.g. Color Field painting, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism), but next fields outdoor the domain of painting, such as design, architecture and fashion. Design historian Stephen Bayley said: “Mondrian has grant mean Modernism. His declare and his work total up the High Modernist ideal. I don’t in the same way as the word ‘iconic’, so let’s tell that he’s become totemic – a totem for anything Modernism set out to be.”