Mondrian 150

Review of 'Piet Mondrian. Catalogue Raisonné'. An impressive work at almost 7 kilos for 2 volumes, it also advances research on the painter and his work enormously.

Work of Dutch artists Piet Mondrian and Mark Manders is currently on show in Japan.

Mondrian, who started out as a fairly traditional landscape painter has come a long way in his last paintings. In Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Victory Boogie-Woogie he added a new and quite significant dimension to his abstract work. The prominence of the lines was broken by using small successive blocks. In both these stimulating paintings the static character of the paintings from the 1920s has given way to a dynamic equilibrium.

This year, the Netherlands is celebrating the centenary of De Stijl, the avant-garde movement that grew up around the De Stijl magazine. De Stijl belongs in the canon of Dutch history and is also the most important Dutch contribution to the modern art of the twentieth century. It has gained a permanent position for itself in surveys of modern art, architecture and design, with several members who are well known, including Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Van der Leck and Gerrit Rietveld. The multidisciplinary orientation and the aim of using art in society in concrete ways are once again topical notions, making De Stijl a relevant point of reference even for today’s art and design world.

The artistic movement De Stijl belongs definitely to the canon of Dutch history. The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag has decided to dedicate a wing of the museum to De Stijl and Mondrian, lasting until 1 January 2014. The exhibition and the accompanying publication are presented in this article.

Is there an art-lover anywhere who has never heard of Rembrandt or Mondrian? Probably not. Many people think of the Netherlands primarily as a land of visual artists, far more than of writers. But are today's Dutch artists also known abroad? Some people will immediately mention the photographer Rineke Dijkstra, or Marlene Dumas. But it is still difficult for painters, sculptors, photographers or designers working in the Netherlands to break through on to the international art scene. The Mondriaan Foundation, a trust for promoting the arts, wants to strengthen the position of contemporary art and design from the Netherlands. In fact, this is one of its two main aims. The other is to stimulate interest in, and demand for, contemporary art within the Netherlands itself.