The project
The Fondation Beyeler owns one of Switzerland’s most extensive collections of paintings by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, ranging from important early works to classic late pictures. Plans for a major Mondrian exhibition at the museum in 2022 provided the impetus to set up the Piet Mondrian Conservation Project. The focus of the project, starting in 2019 and running to 2021, is on the technical investigation of the seven paintings held by the Fondation Beyeler.
Selected works
The Beyeler collection includes seven works by Mondrian that illustrate the development of his work from figuration to abstraction with particular clarity. Click through the works.
Partnership:
The conservation of the four late works is made possible by the generous support of La Prairie (öffnet in neuem Tab).
Eukalyptus
Eucalyptus provides a striking demonstration of Mondrian’s experiments with stylistic elements of Cubism in the treatment of composition and color.
Tableau No. I
Mondrian changed the composition of the painting three times, deeming it to be a finished work each time by signing and dating it.
Composition No. XVI
(Compositie I, Arbres)
Despite the geometric structure of Composition No. XVI, the generally fine lines and sketch-like application of color make the picture light and transparent.
Composition with Yellow and Blue
Between 1929 and 1932, Mondrian created a series of paintings that bear a close likeness to Composition With Yellow and Blue, all of them featuring large yellow rectangles and a small blue field, this latter intended to enhance the luminosity of the yellow. The works of these years are probably most typical of Mondrian’s idea of Neoplasticism.
LOZENGE COMPOSITION WITH EIGHT LINES AND RED (PICTURE NO. 3)
Piet Mondrian created so-called “lozenge” paintings regularly as from the 1910s. Their rhombus format was important for him not least because it enabled him to delegate the problematic “empty corners” of his Cubist compositions to the plane—and more specifically, to the wall.
SHOW ARTWORK
Composition No. VI
(Compositie 9, Blue Façade)
In Composition No. VI Piet Mondrian is more interested in the structural characteristics and colors of the house as sources of inspiration than in its figurative representation.
Composition with Double Line and Blue
Mondrian produced Composition with Double Line and Blue when he was living and working in his studio in the Rue du départ in Paris. There he was a member of the progressive artist groups Cercle et Carré (1929) and Abstraction-Création (1932).
The Artist
Piet Mondrian is one of the foremost painters of classic modernism. His art shows a logical development from figuration to radical abstraction. Starting as a landscape painter in the Dutch nineteenth-century tradition, he progressively concentrated his means of artistic expression. Nature was invariably his model, irrespective of whether he was painting a windmill or the branches of a tree, or devising a composition that appeared non-representational. Eventually he discovered what, for him, was the essence of a picture: line and plane, with black and white, and the three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue.