Virginia Pitts Rembert

As Mondrian worked to suppress the solids and voids of natural subjects in favour of their flat, geometric equivalents, he began to resolve the inconsistencies of three-dimensional natural space and two-dimensional artistic space. At first, he flattened objects, figures, trees, and facades into webs of contours, as in the paintings of 1911-1914. Then he treated the webs and later the crossings of their verticals and horizontals as independent members, unattached to the interstitial areas, as in the “Oceans” and

is original impetus for adapting abstractionism was motivated by spiritualism, but it was also motivated by logic

ese works, he created the paradigm for extending the rules of art when they can no longer carry the artist’s message. Every generation needs its examples of intellectual and creative courage. I believe that Piet Mondrian is such a model for artists of his adopted country

The artist’s stories, of Paris between the two wars as well as of England during both wars, were gripping. She had shown great courage during World War II by organising a women’s group that launched air balloons (“the size of a house,” she said), to intercept low-flying bombers. From Vezelay, I learned what it must have been like to live through the terrible bombings, which Mondrian also endured when he lived in Hampstead.
Another glimpse into Mondrian’s life

demands a superhuman abstraction in order to experience harmony in life.

where Mondrian lived as a war refugee during the last four years of his life. He had long held a dream of the United States as the land of the future and designed his paintings as harbingers of a “new world image”

This statement notwithstanding, he became less and less a realist in the modes of The Hague or Amsterdam, to which Dutch art had shifted in the late 1880s as its artists turned from landscape to city themes. While he continued to use the same painterly strokes as before, the young Mondrian began to heighten his colour, influenced by Impressionist and Post- Impressionist works brought back by friends from Paris. The artist explained his transitional work of this time in a Dialogue on Neo-Plasticism (1920, written in 1919) by saying that he had “increasingly allowed colour and line to speak for themselves” in order to create beauty “more forcefully... without verisimilitude

Although he became known as the ultimate abstractionist, he always thought of himself as a realist - an idea that emanated from the Dutch concept of reality.

In the words of Carl Holty, only one of the artist’s friends and artistic legatees, we are all his “heirs, without equity”.

Modernism.
Only now can it be seen that in his “later works,” Mondrian was more. In