Okay, take a moment and just, you know, picture
it. I'm sure you know the image instantly. Oh,
absolutely. You see it everywhere, whether you're
looking at a priceless piece in a museum or,
I don't know, some iconic piece of 20th century
design. These black horizontal and vertical lines,
they're intersecting at perfect right angles,
carving up a white canvas. And then it's just
punctuated by these perfect blocks of red, yellow,
and blue. It is probably the most instantly recognizable
yet profoundly radical aesthetic in... all of
modern art exactly i mean it really is the ultimate
visual shorthand for modernism itself it's so
clean so rigorous almost machine -like in its
precision it is but the question that immediately
you know springs up for anyone looking at it
is how how did the man who created this universally
recognizable abstract language actually get there
right because he didn't start that way not at
all he didn't begin as some uh minimalist philosopher
working in a sterile Manhattan studio. He started
his life and his career as a gentle Dutch landscape
painter. Just drawing windmills and cows? Exactly.
And the journey from point A to point B is, well,
it's arguably one of the most compelling and
contradictory stories in art history. Okay, so
let's unpack this. Today, we are doing a deep
dive into the fascinating, contradictory, and
deeply spiritual life of Peter Mondrian. Born
Peter Cornelis Mondrian in 1872, lived until
1944. And he is, without a doubt, one of the
greatest pioneers of 20th century abstract art.
So our mission here is pretty simple. We want
to trace his dramatic artistic evolution, try
to understand the surprising spiritual beliefs
that drove his whole quest for these universal
values. And then finally, maybe reveal some of
the intensely human and sometimes, well, sometimes
ridiculous truths about his personal world. Definitely.
So to set the stage, we really should arm you
with the essential vocabulary because Mondrian
wasn't just, you know, painting pictures. He
was building a whole philosophical system. He
co -founded this revolutionary artistic movement
called De Stijl. De Stijl. And that translates
to the style. Very direct. But his personal theory,
the one that gave us the grids, was neoplasticism.
Right. Neoplasticism. Pure plastic art, as he
called it. Exactly. And this whole project, this
entire life's work, was driven by a really powerful,
almost religious utopian concern for finding
universal aesthetics, art that could transcend
the specific, messy details of our day -to -day
reality. And the core artistic vocabulary he
finally settled on is almost shocking in how...
how sparse it is, especially when you think about
the complex philosophies behind it. It's incredible.
He famously reduced his entire creative world,
his whole canvas, down to just three core elements.
Just three. Precisely. First, you've got the
three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow.
Second, the three primary values, black, white,
and gray, although later on he really minimized
the use of gray. Okay. And finally, the two primary
directions, the horizontal and the vertical.
That's it. That's the entire toolkit. And he
believed that was enough. believe that the dynamic,
harmonious balance of just those elements was
enough to capture the rhythm and the foundation
of the entire universe. It's just a remarkable
declaration of intent for any artist, let alone
one working in the early 20th century. That intense,
almost ascetic reduction of the world down to
nine rules, three colors, three values, two directions.
It couldn't have just happened spontaneously.
No, not at all. To really appreciate the grids,
I feel like you have to understand the gentle,
familiar world he was trying to escape from.
That's exactly right. Pete Mondrian was born
in Emersport. in the Netherlands in 1872. He
grew up in a family where art and a pretty rigid
education were central. His father was a drawing
teacher, right? The qualified drawing teacher,
yes. Which meant Pete was introduced to drawing
and painting from a very, very early age. The
family later moved to Winterswick and his uncle,
Fritz Mondrian. Of the Haig School. Of the esteemed
Haig School of Artists, yeah. He also played
a huge role in his training. And the Haig School
was known for its deep, almost romantic engagement.
with the Dutch landscape. So we're talking misty,
atmospheric, very descriptive painting. Very
much so. And after a strict Protestant upbringing,
Mondrian initially took the practical path. He
qualified as a primary education teacher. But
that didn't last? No. By 1892, his true passion
won out, and he entered the Academy for Fine
Art in Amsterdam. So if you look at his work
from this period, say between 1895 and 1905,
it's... It's completely unrecognizable if you
only know his later stuff. Absolutely. Most of
his initial work was naturalistic or impressionistic.
He was painting those iconic pastoral Dutch landscapes.
Windmills, flat fields, rivers. All of it. Quiet
domestic life. He was still very much a student
of his environment and his predecessors. But
even then, even in this early period, you can
kind of see him constantly searching for his
own voice. Oh, for sure. He was experimenting,
absorbing lessons from contemporary European
art. You can trace the influence of techniques
like pointillism. Breaking color down into dots.
Right. And also the vivid emotional colors of
Fauvism, which he started to bring into his work
around 1908. And this period of intense experimentation
is so clear in pieces like The Red Mill or Trees
and Moonrise. They're firmly post -impressionist.
But here's where the trajectory really starts
to bend toward the future. Even when he was painting
a specific object, a tree or a mill, he started
to prioritize color and structure over just,
you know, describing it. You can really see that
in the pivotal work. evening. Red tree from 1908.
Yes. It's definitely still a tree in a field
at dusk. It's rooted in nature. But that palette.
It's almost entirely deep reds, blues, and yellows.
The form is still there, but the colors are already
announcing that primary color obsession that
would define neoplasticism a decade later. It's
like an early warning sign. It's an early auger,
yeah. Signaling that he was starting to treat
color as this independent force. And there's
this crucial transitional phase from about 1905
to 1908 leading up to that piece. There is. His
canvases started depicting these dim, almost
indistinct scenes. The trees and reflections.
and still water, they start to become almost
ghost -like. So you're forced to focus less on,
oh, what kind of tree is that? And more on the
structural balance, the shapes, the way the light
dissolves the specific content. This is his first
big structural shift toward abstraction. And
it's driven by this internal, profound need for
simplification. And this need for simplification,
it wasn't just an aesthetic choice, was it? It
was profoundly spiritual. And this feels like
the absolute linchpin of his entire career. It
is. This is the key insight that distinguishes
Mondrian from so many of his abstract contemporaries.
His art was intimately and structurally related
to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In
1908, he became deeply interested in theosophy.
Which was a spiritual movement started by Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky in the late 19th century.
That's the one. And he officially joined the
Dutch branch of the Theosophical Society in 1909.
So for listeners who might have heard the name
Theosophy but aren't sure of the details, what
were the core ideas that so fundamentally shifted
Mondrian's painting? Well, at its heart, Blavatsky's
Theosophy, especially as she laid it out in her
big work, The Secret Doctrine, believed that
a profound, unifying knowledge of nature was
attainable. But, and this is the crucial part,
It was beyond empirical means. Meaning you couldn't
find universal truth just by looking at the world.
Exactly. You had to look past it. And Mondrian
just bought into this completely. He even stated
later in 1918, I got everything from the secret
doctrine. Wow. So his mission as a painter then
becomes spiritual revelation, not just visual
description. Precisely. He wasn't aiming to paint
what he saw anymore, but to paint the underlying
cosmic balance that organized what he saw. And
this philosophical stance leads him directly
to the grid. Directly. He proclaimed in 1914
that art is higher than reality and has no direct
relation to reality. And if reality is messy
and temporary and specific, then the spiritual
truth must be the opposite. Pure, timeless, universal.
Exactly. He argued to approach the spiritual
in art, one will make as little use as possible
of reality because reality is opposed to the
spiritual. That provides the fundamental why
behind the grids. The specific image of, say,
a Dutch windmill. is a limitation because it
restricts the spiritual idea to one place, one
time. And this links directly to the horizontal
and vertical lines. Theosophy and later Anthroposophy,
which he also followed, they often dealt in these
grand dualities. Masculine and feminine, spirit
and matter. Right. The static and the dynamic.
The vertical line representing the spiritual
often stood in opposition to the horizontal line,
which represented the material earth. His entire
quest was to find a perfect dynamic equilibrium
between these two fundamental forces. So the
grid. It's not a simple design. It's a diagram
of cosmic harmony. It is. That adds massive weight
to those simple lines, doesn't it? It really
does. They're not just aesthetic choices. They're
a diagram of duality. And that connection, it
just remains central to him for his whole life.
Absolutely. Even as late as 1921, he wrote that
his neoplasticism was the art of the foreseeable
future for all true anthroposophists and theosophists.
For Mondrian, abstraction wasn't a choice. It
was a spiritual necessity. It was dictated by
his search for that pure universal spirit that
just couldn't be contained by representational
art. The spiritual drive was clearly there. It
was established in Amsterdam. But to get the
technical tools he needed to achieve that spiritual
goal, he had to go to the center of the technical
revolution. Which meant Paris. Of course. So
in 1912, Mondrian takes that critical step and
moves to the City of Light. And this was a very
deliberate attempt to just immerse himself in
the European avant -garde. He even made a symbolic
gesture to sort of... shed his Dutch provincialism.
He dropped the second A from Mondrian. He did.
He officially became Piet Mondrian. He was signaling
his rebirth as a modern artist. And what he found
there immediately was Cubism, primarily through
the work of Picasso and Georges Braque, who were
just fracturing the traditional picture plane.
And what's fascinating is how quickly he absorbed
it and then synthesized it for his own purposes.
In his first Parisian works, like The Sea from
1912 and his various tree studies, you see the
immediate application of geometric shapes, these
interlocking planes. And a really reduced, almost
monochromatic palette. Lots of grays and ochres.
Yeah. He went from those soft, evocative colors
of his theosophy -inspired period straight into
the highly structured but still representational
hard lines of cubism. But he saw it as a stop
along the way, right? He did. He viewed it as
a crucial port of call on his journey, but not
the final destination. Cubism was necessary because
it showed him how to break down the natural world
into its... geometric components. But he felt
it didn't go far enough. Exactly. Mondrian argued
that because cubism still held on to recognizable
forms, a guitar, a bottle, a face, it was still
tied to representation. And he was after total
pure abstraction. He needed to keep the structure
and just throw out the subject. You could see
that intellectual process of simplification so
clearly when you look at how he treated the same
subject. over multiple years, like the two famous
versions of Still Off the Ginger Pot. Oh, that's
a perfect example. The 1911 version, painted
just before he went to Paris, is definitely indebted
to cubism. You see fractured objects, but they're
still recognizably a pot, a table. But then you
look at the 1912 version. Painted once, he was
fully immersed in Paris. It's night and day.
The objects are radically reduced to just geometric
shapes, a round form, some triangles, rectangles.
He's taking the cubist structure and just stripping
the representation right out of it, moving toward
a pure form of visual organization. But his time
in Paris was cut short. It was. While he was
visiting his family back in the Netherlands in
1914, World War I broke out. Travel back to France
became impossible. So he was effectively stuck
in his home country for four years. And this
wartime detention, it actually turned out to
be incredibly fruitful for his philosophical
development and for collaboration. He ended up
at the Lorraine artist's colony. Where he met
two really crucial figures who were also pushing
the boundaries of abstraction. Bart Vanderleck
and Theo van Doesburg. Vanderleck's influence
seems just massive, especially when it comes
to his color choices. It was decisive. Vanderleck
was already using only primary colors in his
art, along with black, white, and gray. Mondrian
later wrote that his own technique, which he
admitted was still more or less cubist, came
under the influence of his precise method. So
meeting van der Lick basically solidified Mondrian's
limited palette. It got rid of any remaining
vestiges of, you know, greens or purples from
his work. And then together with C .O. van Doesburg,
they co -founded the distil movement and its
journal in 1917. which became the intellectual
platform for his revolution. It was in that journal
that he first published essays defining his mature
theory, neoplasticism, in a series of installments
called The New Visualization in Painting. This
was his first big attempt to define his art not
just in paint, but with rigorous philosophical
language. And the foundational philosophy for
everything that followed is maybe best summed
up in a quote from a letter he wrote in 1914.
He said, I construct lines and color combinations
on a flat surface in order to express general
beauty with the utmost awareness. He's so particular
about the process there. It has to be deliberate,
not emotional. He says nature inspires an emotional
state, but he wants to abstract everything from
that until I reach the foundation. Right. It
sounds less like painting and more like applied
mathematics or philosophy. It really does. And
this abstraction wasn't meant to be chaotic.
He believed that by using only horizontal and
vertical lines constructed with awareness, not
random impulse, but led by high intuition and
brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms
could become a work of art that was as strong
as it is true. He seems to be consciously channeling
that classical platonic Euclidean worldview,
the search for eternal perfect forms. And the
horizontal and the vertical become his only tools
to achieve this perfect, stable, dynamic balance.
For the next two decades, this rigid, self -imposed
restriction became his entire method. He understood
that by limiting his expressive palette, he actually
gave himself universal expressive potential.
It was the foundation of his new vision. So when
World War I finally ends, Mondrian immediately
goes back to Paris in 1918. He finds a continent
that's been devastated. conflict but is also
buzzing with new ideas and he immediately flourished
he fully embraced the art of pure abstraction
for the rest of his life he had arrived at his
philosophical destination The grid. And he believed
this pure abstract art was completely emancipated,
free of naturalistic appearances. Right. And
that realizing these equivalent relationships,
the perfect balance between line and color, horizontal
and vertical, was of the highest importance for
life. So it's a utopian vision. If art could
achieve perfect harmony, then maybe society could
follow. That was the idea. He started producing
these grid -based paintings in late 1919, but
his iconic definitive style, the one we all instantly
recognize, that emerged in a subtle but really
crucial evolution between 1920 and 1921. Okay,
let's track that evolution because the differences
are pretty profound when you look closely. They
really are. In the earliest grids of 1919, the
lines were thin and often gray, not that solid
black we associate with him. And crucially, they
often faded as they approached the canvas edge,
right? They didn't go all the way. Exactly. They
didn't continue to the frame. And the forms themselves
were smaller, more numerous, and almost all of
them were colored. There's very little pure white
space. So a lot of color, and the lines felt
almost... tentative, fading out. That's a good
way to put it. But by late 1920 and into 1921,
we arrive at the look that defined the next two
decades. The lines became thick and black, immediately
establishing this powerful, flat geometry. And
the forms were larger and fewer, with a deliberate
emphasis on white space. And over time, he started
extending all of the black lines completely to
the edges of the canvas. This gives this strong
visual impression that the composition doesn't
end at the frame. Right. It feels like it continues
indefinitely, like a fragment of an infinite
universal structure. And that concept of the
canvas being a fragment of something eternal
is perfectly illustrated by the lozenge paintings
he started doing in the mid -1920s. These were
square canvases that were physically tilted 45
degrees into a diamond shape. The lozenge format
is so important because it intentionally disrupts
the conventional horizontal and vertical orientation
of the wall or the easel. A classic example is
Schilderer's number one. lozenge with two lines
and blue from 1926. This is an incredibly minimal
canvas. Terrifyingly minimal. It's just two black
perpendicular lines and a tiny blue triangular
form in one corner. By tilting the canvas, he
took the vertical and horizontal, which represent
stability, and placed them diagonally within
the frame. It forces a whole new kind of dynamic
tension. It really reinforces that feeling that
what you're seeing is just a cutout of an infinite,
harmonized universal order. It's an intellectual
exercise as much as it is an artistic one. And
this is where we need to get into a crucial technical
detail, a sort of how -to insight that completely
changes how you view these paintings. Okay. When
you look at a Mondrian, you often assume they're
perfectly flat planes of uniform color, almost
like they were machine -made to achieve this
ultimate purity. But up close, they're not like
that at all. Not at all. They reveal subtle brush
strokes, which indicates a very deliberate, nuanced
technique that was designed to create specific
visual effects. That's a surprising contradiction.
Yeah. The artist who's striving for universal
purity through geometric flatness is actually
introducing texture and depth with his painting
method. He is. If you look closely, you see he
used different techniques for different elements.
First, the black lines are generally the flattest
parts, with the least amount of built -up paint
or texture. They're meant to be absolute boundaries.
Second, the colored forms, the red, yellow, and
blue, they have obvious brush strokes, but they're
all applied directionally, running uniformly
in one direction. But the white forms are the
most interesting, and that's where the real spiritual
work seems to be happening. They absolutely are.
Mondrian painted the white forms in layers, using
brush strokes that run in different... often
perpendicular directions. And this seemingly
small technical detail has a huge visual consequence.
Massive. It generates a far greater sense of
physical depth and complexity in the white space
compared to the flat lines or the directional
color blocks. So he was literally sculpting spiritual
depth into the surface using paint strokes to
contradict the flatness of the geometry. The
white space is not just negative space. It's
not just a background. That's the crucial conclusion.
The layering means the white space appears to
visually overwhelm the lines and the colors.
It looks deeper, thicker, more active than the
forms it contains. Which lines up perfectly with
his evolving preference for using more and more
white space. The white is the most complex, layered,
and deep element. It's the spiritual void waiting
to be filled by harmony. That's a revelation.
The quest for the pure universal spirit beneath
reality translated literally into layering white
paint until it gained three -dimensional depth.
He wasn't just simplifying. He was using complexity
to give the impression of infinite purity. And
his work was starting to get global recognition
during this period. In 1926, Catherine Dreyer,
who was a key figure in promoting modernism in
America, acquired one of his diamond compositions,
Painting Eye. And she exhibited it at the Brooklyn
Museum. This was part of the first major exhibition
of modern art in America since the famous 1913
Armory Show. Right, which introduced radical
European modernism to American audiences for
the first time. And Dreyer didn't hold back about
his importance. She publicly stated that Holland
had produced three great painters, Rembrandt,
Van Gogh, and Mondrian. That's positioning him
not just as a contemporary master, but as a historical
icon. It really solidified his position globally.
And as the 1930s went on in Paris, His work continued
this rigorous, subtle evolution. It did. Lines
began to take precedence over forms again. He
started using thinner lines and, crucially, began
introducing double lines more frequently, an
element that's often attributed to the influence
of his friend and contemporary, the artist Marlowe
Moss. But a double line seems like it introduces
hierarchy and complexity, which kind of flies
in the face of his quest for ultimate purity.
How did he justify that departure from his own
rules? He argued that the double line offered
his paintings a new dynamism that he was eager
to explore. By creating parallel lines, he introduced
a sense of clustered energy and movement that
the single line just couldn't provide. So this
relentless search for dynamism, even within his
tightly restricted geometric custom, shows that
his evolution never really stopped. Never. Even
when the style became highly recognizable, he
was never satisfied with a static perfection.
This era of subtle evolution And two years later,
as the war intensified and the threat grew, he
left London aboard the RMS Samaria for Manhattan,
New York City, where he'd stay until his death.
And this move. driven by global catastrophe,
triggered one of the most profound and I would
say joyous stylistic shifts of his entire career.
Oh, completely. New York, with its energy, its
towering geometry, and most importantly, its
vibrant jazz scene, it just unlocked a new level
of dynamism in his work. You can see that transition
so clearly in what are called his transatlantic
paintings. Right. Canvases he started in Europe
and then completed months or years later in New
York, like composition number 12. The finished
works from this period are visually busy. They
have more lines than any of his work since the
early 1920s, and they're often in this overlapping
arrangement that almost looks like a map of a
new city. And it was here in the high energy
of New York that the innovation of colored lines
finally took center stage. He completely abandoned
the black boundary. He had done one simple painting
back in 1933, lozenge composition with four yellow
lines using thick colored lines instead of black.
He had, but that practice had remained dormant
until he arrived in Manhattan. And then he embraced
it with revolutionary fervor in the U .S. You
look at works like Composition, 1938, Place de
la Concorde, 1943, and you can literally see
him taking these unfinished black line paintings
from Paris. The rigid, controlled structure.
And completing them in New York by adding these
short perpendicular lines of different colors.
This changes the visual language entirely. The
new colored areas are thick, almost bridging.
the gap between lines and forms, and suddenly
you have pure color that's completely unbounded
by black. The color isn't contained by the line
anymore. The color is the structure, moving freely
across the plane. It's the closest he ever came
to painting pure energy. And this transition
leads directly to his final, most revolutionary
idiom, the Biggie -Woogie style, an idiom that
was just tragically cut short after only a few
years by his death. The name itself says so much,
doesn't it? It reflects the upbeat, syncopated
rhythm of the jazz music and the vibrant vertical
energy of the city that inspired him. The austerity
of the spiritual grid just gives way to the chaotic
yet structured rhythm of the modern city. That
move from philosophical purity to kinetic rhythm
is just astonishing. It is. And the masterpieces
of this period are Broadway Boogie Woogie and
the unfinished masterpiece, Victory Boogie Woogie.
The technique he pioneered here is nothing short
of radical in its simplicity and effectiveness.
He replaced the solid black lines entirely with
lines that were created from small, adjoining
rectangles of color. And he often created them
using small pieces of colored paper tape. He
moved away from the painter's brush to the designer's
cutout element. Exactly. And the use of colored
paper tape is such a fascinating technical detail.
It gives the lines this pulsating, flickering
quality that solid paint could never achieve.
It feels like the rhythm of neon signs and taxi
cabs flashing by. It does. And in these final
works, the small kinetic forms have definitively
usurped the authoritative role of the solid black
lines. The resulting lattice of flickering color
imparts this wholly new sense of depth and movement.
It's almost vibrating off the canvas. It represents
the most profound stylistic development in his
work since he abandoned representational art
back in 1913. A final, joyful revolution driven
by the music and energy of New York. And speaking
of surprising technical details and fragility,
we have to mention the famous upside -down mystery
concerning the 1941 work New York City of Al.
Yes. This painting also used those removable
strips of painted paper tape. Right. And in 2022,
there was this startling discovery that the work,
which is held in a German gallery, the Kunststammlung
Nordhain -Westfalen, has been displayed upside
down since at least 1980. Since 1980. How did
they figure that out? Art historians analyzing
his process realized that the concentration of
horizontal colored strips, which often represented
the movement of the street or river, should be
at the top of the canvas, symbolizing the beginning
of the city structure. And yet. It was displayed
the other way around for decades, with the strips
all pooling at the bottom. So what's the official
word now? Did the gallery fix it? No. The gallery
explained that they would continue to display
it the wrong way up to avoid damaging the extremely
fragile strips of paper tape, which had settled
in their current orientation over decades. They
feared that repositioning the canvas now could
cause the tape to detach. Wow. What a profound
irony. The greatest, most disciplined abstract
geometrist in history created work so physically
fragile that its intended orientation, its structural
balance, has been sacrificed for its physical
preservation. A testament to how fragile even
the most seemingly rigid perfection can be. So
when you look at those paintings, the absolute
order, the extreme discipline, that platonic
search for universal harmony, you assume the
artist must have been an equally ordered, disciplined,
maybe even cold man. And this is where the deep
dive into the sources reveals this wonderful,
often deeply human contradiction. He was, by
all accounts, intensely eccentric. I read one
critic who described him as someone who lived
like an ambassador from the kingdom of ridiculous
notions. And someone who had no sense of humor
and rarely smiled. He really committed to his
austerity. He lived almost like a monk. He did.
He never married or had any long -lasting romantic
relationships. He believed they inevitably obstructed
his work and led to unnecessary obligations.
He lived alone, surviving largely on this minimalist
diet of lentils and coffee. And in his studios,
he often refused to have standard furniture,
right? He built his own. Built his own severe
right -angled tables and chairs out of discarded
fruit crates. The environment had to match the
canvas. It sounds like an intense control freak.
He was. And his eccentricities extended into
these bizarre fears and dietary quirks, which
are almost comical against the backdrop of his
profound artistic seriousness. We know he was
a follower of theosophy, but he also followed
phrenology. Yes, the now discredited pseudoscience
that claimed you could determine character and
intelligence by studying the shape and bumps
on a person's skull. So he was looking for universal
structure, not just in the cosmos, but in the
contours of the human head. Exactly. And his
list of fears was long and peculiar. He stuck
to these strange fad diets, notably refusing
to use ice cubes because he believed that cold
food was bad for the health. But his physical
fears were even more intense. They were. He was
extremely afraid of eye injuries, even refusing
to play games with his brothers as a child. Wait,
a pioneer of visual art was deathly afraid of
damaging his vision. That just introduces this
layer of existential anxiety to his entire output.
It really does. And he was also profoundly afraid
of spiders. There's one truly memorable anecdote
that perfectly captures this man of intense control
just completely losing it. Oh, this I have to
hear. fell asleep during a concert, woke up,
spotted a spider on his clothing, and started
screaming loudly, disrupting the entire performance.
You're kidding. This puritanical pioneer of modern
art started screaming in the middle of a symphony.
That's the story. That contrast, the absolute
control required for the grid versus this primal,
almost childish terror of a spider. It just highlights
the tension in his internal life. It connects
to the bigger picture. You have this man of absolute,
almost fearful control and isolation living the
most rigid existence possible to achieve universal
truth on the canvas. Which makes his secret lifelong
passion the ultimate glorious contradiction.
It really is. This solitary man who lived on
lentils and crates searching for static. was
a committed and passionate dancer. He was a regular
dancer from his early days in Amsterdam onward.
Even in the isolation of the Lorraine artist's
colony when he was trapped during World War I,
he danced waltzes and tangos. Though observers
noted he did so very slowly, keeping his body
almost totally rigid. That sounds less like a
passionate expression and more like performance
art based on his paintings. A rigid vertical
figure moving across a floor. A controlled movement,
for sure, but he adapted as he moved through
the modern world. When he got back to Paris,
he embraced the chaos and spontaneity of jazz
and the Charleston. He took friends out to hot
spots like the Jungle Bar and the Petit Teddy.
So the man who banished all trace of human emotion
and movement from his canvas was actively seeking
out the raw, syncopated rhythm of jazz in his
personal time. And this wasn't just a youthful
phase. Even when he fled fascism and was living
in North London in 1939, not exactly a booming
jazz scene, he would still wander down to Camden
Town to dance at places like the Camden Palace.
Amazing. And right before his 70th birthday in
New York, he celebrated his recovery from a long
bout of rheumatism with a wild night out at Cafe
Society. This raises a really important question.
If the grid was his spiritual architecture, his
attempt to freeze the universe into this perfect
static balance, then maybe the chaotic, joyful
rhythm of dancing was the necessary dynamism
and life force that he suppressed everywhere
else. His personal pressure release valve? Exactly.
I think the dynamism he eventually allowed into
his final paintings, the boogie -woogie works,
was arguably first rehearsed on the dance floor.
The tension between his intellectual pursuit
of purity and his physical craving for rhythm
perfectly explains the two sides of his genius.
And that profound contradiction between his rigid
persona and his deep spiritual yearning, it really
finds its synthesis in how he created his studio
spaces. Oh, absolutely. Mondrian used his studios
in Paris, London, and Manhattan as these dynamic,
nurturing environments that were themselves works
of art. or maybe architectural blueprints. He
essentially treated the studio walls as a massive
three -dimensional extension of his canvas. He
did. In Paris, to hide the studio's structural
flaws and the, you know, chaotic reality of the
walls, he would tack up these large rectangular
placards of single colors or neutral tones. Then
he'd add smaller colored paper squares and rectangles
to accent the walls, constantly repositioning
them. It sounds almost like a modern digital
design process, like constantly... rearranging
elements on a mood board or a screen until the
composition finds its perfect balance. He established
this creative schedule where a period of intense
painting would alternate with a period of experimentally
regrouping the smaller colored cutouts on the
walls. So the process of arranging and rearranging
the colored elements directly fed the next period
of painting. It was a pattern he followed for
the rest of his life. He turned his living space
into an active laboratory for neoplasticism.
And when he arrived in Manhattan in 1943, he
created his final definitive studio at 15 East
59th Street. meticulously designed it himself.
He painted the high walls off -white and built
his own self -designed furniture from those fruit
crates. Visitors to this last studio often said
that while there were few new canvases, the eight
large compositions of colored bits of paper he
had tacked to the walls created an environment
that was, paradoxically, both kinetic and serene.
Stimulating and restful, Mondrian himself declared
it the best space he had ever inhabited. His
vision of total lived harmony finally realized.
And when he died so suddenly of pneumonia in
February 1944, this environment was instantly
recognized as a legacy in itself. Yes, his friend
and sponsor, the artist Harry Holtzman, who was
his heir, along with another painter friend,
Fritz Glarner, carefully documented and traced
these wall compositions. Which was a crucial
act of preservation. They created these portable
wall works or facsimiles by carefully affixing
the original surviving cutout components to trace
copies of the walls. And these portable wall
works have since been exhibited internationally,
giving us this rare insight into the final dynamic
phase of his creative process, a phase that was
literally merging art, architecture and life.
Before we discuss his monumental legacy in the
wider world, we should also acknowledge his other
more figurative art that he kind of kept secret.
The flower paintings. Right. Mondrian continued
to paint figurative works, creating these delicate
portraits of individual flowers. He blended his
strict academic training with what critics argue
were his subconscious spiritual and romantic
yearnings. He painted these in a secretive manner
into the 1920s, often claiming they were just
for commercial reasons, a way to earn money without
compromising his abstract work. Which suggests
this profound tension. He was intellectually
committed to abstraction, rejecting nature, yet
he needed the commercial safety net and maybe
the emotional outlet that painting these individual
specific blooms provided. It's the one clear
artistic concession he made to reality. It contributes
to a broader, richer view of his life that's
very different from the traditional narrative
of pure. cold artistic evolution. It does. However,
his enduring legacy in the realm of pure abstraction
is just undeniable. The influential critic Robert
Hughes described him as one of the supreme artists
of the 20th century and a totem for everything
modernism set out to be. And that artistic acclaim
translates to enormous market value, proving
the longevity of his vision. Recent auction sales
have been just astronomical. In 2022, composition
No. 2 sold at Sotheby's for $51 million. And
another piece, composition with large red plane,
fetched $47 .6 million in 2025. We should also
note a more sobering aspect of his legacy, which
speaks to the historical upheaval he endured.
The ongoing lawsuits filed by his heirs seeking
the return of four paintings from Germany and
composition with blue from the Philadelphia Museum
of Art. All of which had been seized by the Nazis
during the war. Yes. We connect this to the bigger
picture. Mondrian's utopian vision didn't just
stay within the gallery walls, did it? It just
exploded into global culture in every possible
way, proving his own conscience. concept that
his art was universal and scalable. The ubiquity
is astounding. In fashion, you have Yves Saint
Laurent's iconic 1965 Mondrian collection of
shift dresses, which instantly brought high art
to mass consumption. And Lola Prusak designed
luggage for Hermes in the 1930s with geometric
inlays of red, blue, and yellow leather squares.
It extends deep into design and even sport. The
La Vie Claire cycling team used Mondrian -inspired
designs for their bikes and jerseys in the 80s.
Nike released special edition Dunk Low SB shoes
inspired by his painting. The aesthetic is used
on album covers and in technology. And in technology,
his influence is particularly strong because
his aesthetic translates so easily into code.
There are various software systems named after
him for specialized purposes. Like data visualization
systems, Google's code review system. And even
open source OLAP servers. Those are the huge
complex analytical systems companies use to analyze
massive amounts of business data. And maybe the
most whimsical tribute. is the peat esoteric
programming language. Yes. For listeners unfamiliar,
an esoteric language is designed to push the
boundaries of computer programming, often for
humor or intellectual challenge. In the case
of peat, programs look literally like Mondrian
-style abstract art. So the color boundaries
and blocks actually determine the code's function.
It's the ultimate homage. Even urban planning
is affected. The building facades of Chun Yung
Estate, a massive public housing complex in Hong
Kong, were consciously inspired by the geometric,
horizontal, and vertical elements of his work.
From spiritual quests in a Dutch landscape, through
the rhythm of jazz, to public housing architecture
in Asia, the reach of those few black lines and
three colors is just incredible. So what does
this all mean for you, the learner, looking to
grasp Mondrian quickly but thoroughly? I think
his life was defined by this relentless spiritual
pursuit of one single pure idea, that universal
beauty and cosmic harmony could be found by stripping
away the temporary mess of reality. He started
with careful, descriptive Dutch landscapes, used
cubism as a necessary structural launchpad, and
then developed the extreme, isolated discipline
of neoplasticism. only to find a final, kinetic,
joyful burst of color and energy inspired by
the syncopated rhythms of New York jazz. He died
of pneumonia in New York City in 1944, but the
outpouring of respect he received was immense.
His memorial service was attended by nearly 200
people. Including fellow artistic revolutionaries
like Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger,
and Alexander Calder. It just proves his stature
within the global artistic community he'd worked
so hard to join. His legacy is perfectly summarized
by Robert Hughes, who reflected that Mondrian
was one of the last painters who believed that
the conditions of human life could be changed
by making pictures. Think about that as our final
provocative thought. What does it mean for a
simple, disciplined grid of primary color to
hold such massive spiritual and utopian weight?
If Mondrian truly believed that this art, this
dynamic balance of opposites, could change the
world, then the grid isn't a limitation on expression.
It's a blueprint for a better future, a future
built on perfect, universal harmony.