MONDRIAN

A deep dive into the art and times of the Dutch-born modernist painter.

In this exceptionally well-crafted and researched biography, cultural historian Weber explores the intimate connection between Mondrian’s austere yet exuberant paintings and his life. Born Pieter Mondriaan to a neo-Calvinist Protestant teacher and his wife, the painter became a leading light of the early-20th-century avant-garde. He both “mirrored…and reacted against” the rigidity and religious absolutism of his parents; where they taught him to hold fast to his spiritual convictions, his more worldly uncle Frits introduced him to the unabashed “pursuit of visible beauty.” Frits schooled his beloved nephew in the commercially popular “Hague school” style that focused realistic natural scenes; as Mondrian grew older, he gravitated to the candid modernism of Van Gogh and, in particular, to deploying light, lines, and color in ways that created “the energy and robustness that would become Mondrian’s hallmarks.” As a young man, he left the Netherlands for France, where he abandoned his uncle’s traditionalism and committed to a more radical aesthetic; Frits retaliated by insisting Piet drop one “a” from his last name so he would no longer be associated with his “depraved nephew.” Moving among the patrons, artists, and art dealers in Paris and, later, New York who helped define the modernist era, Mondrian immersed himself in the geometric, perspectival playfulness of cubism. Near the end of the First World War, he co-founded the influential De Stijl arts movement, which emphasized the absolute rectilinear abstraction and primary color “purity” that Mondrian believed created art that transcended “the small issues of everyday life” and offered “spiritual grace.” Written with a scholarly precision that revels in the nuances of Mondrian’s remarkable life and work, Weber’s book offers an immersive, if lengthy, biographical experience for lovers of both art history and modernism.

Passionately rendered and richly detailed.