Mondrian Evolution

Marking the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth, the Fondation Beyeler will devote an exhibition to the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. As one of the most important artists of the avant-garde movement, Mondrian shaped the evolution of painting from figuration to abstraction. His early work was influenced not only by late 19th century Dutch landscape painting but also by Symbolism and Cubism. It was only in the early 1920s that he began concentrating on a wholly non-representational pictorial vocabulary consisting solely of rectilinear arrangements of black lines on a white background and the three primary colours blue, red and yellow.