Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter, born in Amersfoort in 1872, who died in New York in 1944. He is remembered for paintings made of black lines and blocks of red, blue and yellow on a white ground, the grids that later turned up on dresses. He did not start there. He spent years painting trees and windmills, and his last pictures were made to the beat of boogie woogie.
The grid looks like it came from a drawing board. It came from a Dutch tree, a spiritual movement and dance music.
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Mondrian has a reputation as the coldest of painters, a man who reduced painting to rules and worked his pictures out like sums. He told it the other way round. The painter Charmion von Wiegand reported him saying that all his paintings were done first and the theory derived from them.
The man behind the rules also loved to dance. During the First World War, in the artists' village of Laren, he picked up the nickname the Dancing Madonna. In New York, von Wiegand wrote, his delight in dancing to boogie woogie was unfeigned.
That mix of rigor and rhythm runs through his whole career, and it ends on a painting he never finished. Victory Boogie Woogie, made of oil, colored paper and tape, was still in progress when he died in 1944. How a Dutch landscape painter ended up there is the story of a tree, a spiritual movement and a few quarrels.
What You'll Discover
Why he left the trees behind.
Who he fell out with over a diagonal.
What jazz did to his grid.
What he left unfinished on the easel.
What hung upside down for decades.