Room Guide: “Mondrian Evolution”

This selection of paintings and oil sketches dates from the period between around 1895 and 1908, during which Mondrian was mainly influenced by the Hague School, which combined an impressionist style with the depiction of atmospheric Dutch scenery.

These pictures represent the landscape of the Netherlands, with its farmhouses under oftentimes rain-laden skies, its water ditches reflecting back the sky and the windmills. In the Netherlands, the main function of windmills is to drain the artificially reclaimed land, which lies below sea level. As we can see in the small paintings featuring views of water ditches and willow trees, Mondrian was already interested in the relation between painted surface and spatial illusion. And when he wanted to depict sunlight, he used a trick dating back to 17th-century Dutch art and painted white laundry, which was hung in the sun to dry and to bleach.

In the years around 1910, Mondrian repeatedly spent lengthy periods of time on the Walcheren peninsula in Zeeland on
the North Sea coast. He painted views of the beach and its distinctive breakwaters jutting horizontally into the sea, among them Beach with Five Piers at Domburg, but also vertical compositions featuring towers, the landmarks of this landscape. Two paintings dating from 1909/10 and 1911 represent the church towers of Zoutelande and Domburg. In very different ways, both are literally built with colour: the earlier image is composed of orange-red dots. The Domburg church tower is also represented in evening light. Its upper part is bathed in pink by the sun’s last rays while its lower section is already shrouded in blue evening shadow. Mondrian has captured the atmosphere surrounding the building in a striking manner, using blue polygons that float in front of the architecture and a green background. The lighthouse at Westkapelle is depicted using long vertical brushstrokes, which emphasise the sense of height that emanates from the building. This room also displays a painting from 1936, which rather than a tower features an abstract vertical composition.

Evening: The Red Tree shows the fleeting moment in which the light of the setting sun turns a tree a luminous red against an already deep blue sky. The motif of the tree remained a source of fascination for Mondrian even after his encounter with Cubism in Paris prompted a further step toward abstraction. However, taking nature as his starting point, his focus now shifted: in his striking painting from 1912, which hangs directly next to Evening: The Red Tree, he did not strive to depict the way the tree appears in the light. Rather, he represented it as an image of growth. The colour red, noticeable only at second glance among the picture’s mainly grey hues, does not reflect the light of the sun. In this instance, it could be seen as signifying the return of spring after a cold winter.

Even when they seem already far removed from their model in nature, all the works in this room uphold the idea of painting and art as tied to the notion of organic growth.

This room brings together works from three important periods in Mondrian’s oeuvre, all of them created before he began focussing on radically abstract compositions. Around 1908, influenced among others by Vincent van Gogh, Mondrian produced expressive, colourful paintings. Most famous among them is Mill in Sunlight with its vibrant tones of yellow and red, which caused a scandal upon its presentation at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum; according to one critic, whoever painted like this must be suffering from hallucinations. The paintings produced in the wake of Mondrian’s encounter with Cubism between 1912 and 1914 form the second group. The colour palette has been scaled back in favour of a rich variety of shapes and lines.

Greys and browns set the tone of these paintings. While the compositions are still suggestive of models drawn from nature, these no longer play any role. Mondrian has designed structures that appear in the pictorial space against an indeterminate background.

It would be wrong to presume a direct path leading from these paintings to Mondrian’s abstract work from the 1920s onward, as shown by the group of three windmills, all painted in 1917. It seems that Mondrian aimed to push the reduction to the essential to the very edge of figuration. The windmill in Windmill in the Evening, fully cast in shadow, becomes a flat silhouette, the illusionism of depiction reaching its limits toward abstraction.

During his 1909 and 1910 stays on the Walcheren peninsula, Mondrian worked intensely on the depiction of sand dunes, whose contours are constantly shifting under the influence of the wind. Mondrian attempted to capture the dynamic nature of the dunes by using dots of colour. He also showed the dunes’ protean appearance in the changing light. The largeformat painting Summer, Dune in Zeeland (1910) provides a striking example; we seem to be looking at a large wave shortly before it breaks. The composition follows the outline of an oval, a shape Mondrian would later often use to suggest endlessness.

In the summer of 1914, Mondrian was unable to return to Paris due to the outbreak of World War I. He spent the late summer at the seaside, first likely in Scheveningen and then once more on Walcheren. He drew the view onto the wide expanse of the sea, using the oval as an abstract shape of expansiveness and boundlessness. In paintings such as Ocean 1, he represented the sea itself as a system of black lines meeting at more or less right angles, suggestive – in the broadest sense – of a free arrangement of plus and minus signs.

Mondrian liked to paint at dusk, when colours and colour combinations undergo intense change. He probably studied Goethe’s theory of colours, which describes in detail the chromatic moods that arise in the evening twilight. Mondrian was interested in depicting the way things appear rather than the way things look, as shown by his image of an arum lily. In Mondrian’s rendering, the plant’s white flower appears blue in the evening light, rimmed by a red shimmer. Around the same time, he drew three self-portraits; his face is shrouded in the shadows of dusk, his pupils wide open, receptive to even the smallest amount of light. In one of these self-portraits, Mondrian focused solely on the eyes – without them, there is no painting.

Mondrian’s depictions of plants in the fleeting state of fading or withering are also images of transition. He was concerned less with the fact of dying than with transformation in the spiritual sense, as evidenced by the title of the painting representing a wilting chrysanthemum: Metamorphosis. This may also be an allusion to Goethe and his celebrated poem The Metamorphosis of Plants.

The exhibition’s last room is devoted to the abstract compositions that Mondrian developed in the years after 1917. From around 1920, they led to what Mondrian termed “Neoplasticism”, namely images consisting of intersecting perpendicular lines as well as mostly white, blue, red and yellow areas. Mondrian’s worldwide fame rests on these works, which to this day exert a profound influence on architecture and design. The room’s layout echoes Mondrian’s abstract compositions. The idea is for the paintings to be viewed largely without the influence of other images, allowing visitors to focus on one work at a time. This approach would very much be in the spirit of Mondrian, who probably held the belief that a form of spiritual space could open between his neoplastic images and their viewers. ”

Immersing oneself in the contemplation of a painting such as No. VI / Composition No. II (1920), the coloured areas develop a strangely autonomous existence: some seem to push forward, others to recede into the background. This gives seeing a rhythm, with which Mondrian, a great fan of jazz, underscored these paintings. The longer one looks at Composition with Yellow and Blue (1932), a work held in the Beyeler Collection, the more one feels that Mondrian worked with different shades of white. Yet as revealed by the investigation of this painting by the Fondation Beyeler’s conservators, this is not the case. This impression is due solely to the interplay with the other colours and the orientation of the brushstrokes. The other works held in the Beyeler Collection were also examined and analysed, confirming a long-held hypothesis: Mondrian did not geometrically measure his neoplastic images, but composed them freely and only rarely used preparatory charcoal drawings. He often repeatedly changed and painted over his compositions over lengthy periods of time until he had found what he felt to be the perfect balance. He used no tools such as rulers and worked freehand. On the one hand, the paintings convey an appearance of great rigour and precision; on the other hand, they rest upon the intuition of their creator, who in composing them let himself be led entirely by his artistic sense of form.

The exhibition closes with a work from the Beyeler Collection, one of Mondrian’s famous rotated squares standing on one tip, Picture No. III (1938). The intersecting perpendicular lines, running vertically and horizontally, combined with a red area, appear like a detail of a much larger system that could be extended into infinity. This highlights Mondrian’s ambition for his abstract compositions to permeate all areas of visible and invisible life.