Mondrian Evolution

Exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 5 June - 9 October 2022;
at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westafalen, Düsseldorf, 28 October 2022 - 12 February 2023

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) had a decisive influence on the evolution of painting from figuration to abstraction. Born into a strict Calvinist family, the artist became famous for his compositions of black lines and rectangular fields in primary colours, but his early work was influenced by 19th-century Dutch landscape painting.

This catalogue of the exhibition organised on the occasion of his 150th birthday is devoted to the Dutch painter's work and artistic development, from his beginnings influenced by Dutch landscape painting of the late 19th century to his completely non-representational pictorial vocabulary developed from the early 1920s. In separate chapters, this development is traced through motifs such as windmills, dunes, the sea, farms reflected in water and plants in various forms of abstraction.