Off the Grid

Before you start to think about Mondrian’s paintings,” says Hans Janssen, whose new biography of the artist, Piet Mondrian: A Life, will be published in June to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, “you have to know that he was born by candlelight in Amersfoort,” a still substantially medieval town near Utrecht. “Yet he died beneath fluorescent lights on the 36th floor of a skyscraper in New York. That is an enormous leap.”

So perhaps it’s no surprise that half a century before he painted Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), by which time he was all but synonymous with sober grids and austere blocks of primary colour, he was a painter of figurative landscapes. He catered pragmatically to the Dutch bourgeoisie, who favoured conventional pictures of windmills, agricultural buildings and trees, a subject he famously came to hate. As Nicholas Fox Weber writes in Piet Mondrian’s Early Years, “Later in life, when Mondrian was at the height of his fame, there would be at least three occasions in Paris when he was at friends – the Arps, the Gleizes, the Kandinskys – for lunch and insisted on being seated with his back to a window lest he have even the smallest part of a tree in his line of vision.”

Screenprint of Mondrian’s Composition with Black Lines, published in 1957

Portret van de dochters van Jan Coenraad Holtzappel by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Estimate: €70,000 - 80,000 (£60,000 - 70,000)

Mondrian painted people in those early years too, making no attempt to flatter the two little girls, Alida and Marie, one cross-eyed, in the far-from-idealised portrait that Bruun Rasmussen in Denmark is offering on 14 June. Painted in about 1900, The Daughters of Jan Coenraad Holtzappel pose in matching sailor dresses against a soberly rendered wooden chair. So far, so conventional; yet the way he treats the cushion seems to presage Fauvism in its colours and shapes.

Versatile to a fault (he also made scientific drawings and copies of paintings in museums), Mondrian began to exhibit in 1893, when he was 21. The works he made over the following decade betray a range of influences: there is a suggestion of Corot in the way he renders trees; his agricultural realism recalls that of Bastien-Lepage; and there is a hint of the Expressionist anguish of Munch. But, with one or two notable exceptions – Farm with Laundry on the Line (c.1897), now in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, for example, with its quadrilateral blocks of white and lozenges of colour – his early paintings are not always distinctive, nor discernibly his own.

By 1903, he was broadly disillusioned. He had, he told his closest friend, Albert Pieter van den Briel, “lost faith in his fellow human beings” and was feeling “out of balance”. Van den Briel, who had quit his medical studies to become a forester and moved to Brabant in the south of the Netherlands, invited him to come and spend some time in the country. Mondrian visited him first in July, returning the following January and staying a year, during which he made about 30 paintings, drawings and watercolours. These works were to mark something of a watershed in his career.

Among them was a black chalk, watercolour and gouache work on paper, Barn Doors on a Brabant Farm Building. Recently rediscovered, it was offered by Bukowskis in the Modern Art + Design Sale in Stockholm on 18 May.

Here in Brabant, he felt free enough to paint for himself, not the market. He found himself fascinated by the local architecture. Brabant farms – such as the one in the picture, thought to have belonged to a man named Hannes Kranenbroek in the village of Nistelrode – had long low façades, punctuated by sets of doors that led to the domestic quarters, threshing room or stables to ensure each space remained discrete. Their huge thatched roofs were steeply pitched. As Fox Weber describes them, their “honest functional forms flow in a melodic rhythm”. Here was a subject Mondrian felt inspired by.

Cycling or walking between villages with his dog, Beppie, Mondrian would work en plein air and develop the composition when he got home, stylising the interplay between the lines and grids he observed.

He began to see colour anew too. The earliest works from this period have what Fox Weber calls “a lustre consistent with his new contentment and serenity”. But halfway through the year, he sold the large leather screen he had used to absorb the light from the window in his studio to his landlord, a cattle merchant called Louis van Zwanenbergh. (Van Zwanenberg, his seven children and Mondrian all shared a house by the tram station in Uden.) His palette became bolder and more saturated, his shapes more stylised and intense. As van den Briel observed in the memoir he wrote of the artist, “It was here at Uden that the real Mondrian was born.”

Look at the works of Kranenbroek’s Brabant farm (there’s an oil and a drawing of the same subject in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag). Though they are clearly figurative – the buildings, the chickens – they are also full of linear details that prefigure the grids and restricted palette – that vibrant blue vertical just off centre – that came to define the form of geometric abstraction he pioneered. Or note the way he renders the undefined, unruly verdure in the right foreground. There you can see the seeds of his Apple Tree in Bloom of 1912, and the numbered but unnamed Compositions that followed it, with their short deliberate black lines and right angles.

As van den Briel wrote of a visit they made to another farm, Mondrian “sat dreamily observing the room we were sitting in, the whitewashed walls, red doors, the box bed too, the hearth with ash etc, a goat lying against a wall, everything beautiful in colour, and peace; most of all peace” – a peace that enabled him to see the world, its colours and its shapes with fresh eyes.

His year in the country enabled him to take risks with media as well. “His works on paper at this time are intensely washed, freeing the pigments, giving the paper’s texture a granulated look,” writes Janssen. “This method was not accepted as a virtue at the time,” he continues. “But it allowed Mondrian to regulate in detail the internal harmony of the extremely subtle and close contrasts [enabling him] to render the smallest variations of the weather.”

Barn Doors on a Brabant Farm Building was bought by Marius Johannes Heijbroek, to whose sister, Gretha, Mondrian was briefly engaged. Indeed the family acquired several of his paintings. (In 1933, Marius emigrated to Sweden, where the painting – now authenticated by the RKD, the Dutch Institute of Art History – as the work of Mondrian, came to light.)

Barn Doors of a Brabant Farm Building by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Estimate: €80,000 - €100,000 (£70,000 - 85,000)

Mondrian also found solace in bible study during his year in Brabant. A Calvinist by upbringing, he and van den Briel would discuss religions, which led to Mondrian’s interest in Theosophy. The artist’s commitment to this spiritual movement, whose teachings strive to reconcile the differences between science and spiritualism and Eastern and Western religions, lasted the rest of his life. When Mondrian died in 1944, his Theosophical Society membership card was found among his papers, and its French headquarters had served as his first home in Paris when he moved there in 1911.

There he encountered Cubism for the first time. Though Braque and Picasso made an impression on him, Cubism “did not”, as he wrote, “accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries: it is not developing towards its own goal [which is] the expression of a pure plastic form”. Which was, of course, the essence of Neoplasticism or De Stijl, as the style of abstract painting Mondrian developed became known.

Its tenets, he wrote in the first issue of the magazine De Stijl, launched by his friend Theo van Doesburg, were to “ignore the particulars of appearance [and to] find expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.” Two preoccupations that grew out of his year in Brabant and his love of its buildings. No wonder the German-American artist and influential teacher Hans Hofmann called him “the architect of modern painting”.

Claire Wrathall writes for the Financial Times and other publications.

Mondrian in the Netherlands, 1917 – not long after this photo was taken, he dedicated himself to abstraction