How Piet Mondrian became the world’s greatest abstract geometrist

WHEN he was 68, Piet Mondrian arrived in New York, having fled Nazi-occupied Europe. He was celebrated by such 20th-century American greats as Ad Reinhardt, Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko, who called him the most sensual of artists. Mondrian had an even more obvious impact on design, paving the way for Gerrit Rietveld’s “Red Blue Chair”, Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 shift dress, packaging for L’Oréal, a cosmetics company, and even Nike trainers. Along with Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, the Dutch painter is one of the fathers of abstract art.

What is less well known about Mondrian is that he only developed his signature style when he was in his 50s. The shift came after a long and focused process of searching and experimenting with paint, form and composition, which had begun when he was still in his teens and living in his native Netherlands, where the reigning genre was sombre landscape paintings dotted with cows and windmills.

An important new show, “The Discovery of Mondrian”, at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, plots every step of that development through the 300 works it owns—the largest trove of Mondrian’s work anywhere. The most extensive exhibition ever devoted to his painting (no other artists feature), it is the centrepiece of a nationwide celebration of the Dutch master and De Stijl (“The Style”), the art movement that Mondrian helped found exactly a century ago.

In 2009 the Gemeentemuseum launched a project to re-examine every Mondrian painting in its collection. At the same time its chief Mondrian expert, Hans Janssen, was busy writing a new life of the artist, “Piet Mondrian: A New Art for a Life Unknown”. Far from being an eccentric recluse, as has long been thought, Mondrian, it turns out, was something of a ladies’ man. He loved jazz, learned all the latest dance steps and was fully engaged in the avant-garde culture that surrounded him.

“The Discovery of Mondrian” presents about a quarter of his output, from his earliest student drawings to his final masterpiece, “Victory Boogie Woogie” (pictured), which he left unfinished on his easel when he died of pneumonia in New York in 1944. Walking through the show, you can see a clear progression. It starts with traditional landscape paintings such as “Trees along the Gein” (1905)—by a precocious and skilled painter with a strong, intuitive sense of line, form and composition. These turn into more experimental landscapes, for example “Evening: The Red Tree” (1908-10) or the highly colourful and luminous “Mill in Sunlight” (1908), a response to Vincent van Gogh, and the more formally Luminist works, including “The Red Windmill” (1911). The visitor encounters such paintings as “Composition No. IV” (1914), inspired by Braque and Picasso, and sees how Mondrian moved into the familiar colour-grid works, notably “Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue” (1921).

The show is a visual pilgrimage. The artist moves from lush, realistic illusionism, paring down the act of painting until he reduces it to its essential elements: pure, clean colour, line and form. (The “Discovery” of the exhibition title happens both to Mondrian and to the viewer.)

The breakthrough to abstraction came after the first world war ended. Just before Mondrian returned to Paris in 1919, he painted two pictures with lots of colourful squares arranged in a Cubist structure, and made “Composition with Grey Lines”, a diamond-shaped canvas with a grid of horizontal, vertical and diagonal grey lines that divide up the canvas into triangles and squares. The painting looks unassuming today, but it represented a revolution in art: “That was the moment we realised how far he dared to go,” says Benno Tempel, director of the Gemeentemuseum and one of the curators of the show. “It became more and more about rhythm and harmony.”

And then, after emigrating to America in 1940, Mondrian went even further. His late canvases—represented in this exhibition by just one work, “Victory Boogie Woogie”, displayed in a room of its own—made art into a form of visual music, separating it from the world of the tangible to reach for the transcendent.