Mondrian and his edges

As someone who has always been interested in abstraction in the visual arts Piet Mondrian has continually lurked in the background and often enough forced his way forward into my own work. When I think back to my time as a student in London, he was one of the reasons that a few friends and I made a visit to the Netherlands. We visited the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague to see firsthand the works of this influential Dutch master. To be honest I can’t quite remember which works we saw, but it certainly wasn’t as many are as currently on view at the museum. To mark the centenary of the setting up of De Stijl the Gemeentemuseum has dipped deep into its collection and pulled out pretty much everything in order to mount a hugely extensive exhibition that gives a great deal of context and background to the work that brought him to the abstract images with which we tend to immediately settle on when thinking about Mondrian.

This framing of context of Mondrian’s work is further extended by the presence of a second exhibition, Rumoer in de Stad (Tumult in the city), in the museum that focuses on the Dutch artistic world from 1880 onwards, and in particular around The Hague itself.  It features work by the likes of George Hendrik Breitner, Isaac Israëls and Willem Witsen. It creates a clear image of daily and cultural life in Dutch society at the end of the nineteenth century. The paintings and drawings displayed ooze a spontaneity and a pleasure in the materials that the artists were using. It’s easy to allow yourself to imagine the world that these artists moved in and were recording in their work.

It is very much this sort of context that Mondrian was building on when he moved to the city to begin his artistic career. The Gemeentemuseum documents extensively this early work. There are walls literally covered in landscape paintings. To start with they are often painted in a quite restrained way. But sure enough, as you pass through subsequent galleries we see the familiar process of reduction, abstraction and heightening of colour start to take place leading us to rooms of archetypal ‘Mondrians’ from the collection and ultimately to the museums pride and joy, Victory Boogie Woogie.

Anything but graphic

The abstract paintings of the 1920s and 30s have understandably been responsible for securing the Dutch man’s place in art history. The countless reproductions and reusing of the black verticals and horizontals with zones of primary colour have become the something of a trademark. But they have also become way more graphic in our minds than they are. I’ve always been aware of the painterly qualities of Mondrian’s work, it strikes you immediately when you see the original work.

But when seeing such a quantity of paintings as are currently on display you become more aware than ever how important edges between areas of colour were to the artist. There’s nothing graphic or in any way hard.in the early work the edges are soft and defused.  As the world Mondrian chose to represent became more reduced the edges became areas of paint seeminly pushing together to create an edge with very much a manmade tension to it. Whilst drawing tends to focus on line, painting challenges to artist to deal with edges, edges where two colours come together, Mondrian understood edges and how often details occurring on a very small scale can carry important consequences.

Throughout the whole exhibition you are constantly aware of the hand of the artist, decisions and refinements constantly being considered and worked.  An approach that is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the room with nothing on the pristine white walls, except that is, for the engaging presence that is Victory Boogie Woogie.

 

 

Is there a better combination of exercise, landscape and art?

I first visited the Kröller-Müller museum in the Hoge Veluwe National park when I was an art student in London.  There had been an official college trip organised to Barcelona and Madrid, however I and a few friends simply didn’t have the money to join such an outing.  As an alternative we organised our own cultural excursion.  It was a cut price affair, staying in the cheapest of cheap hostels in Amsterdam and spending, I think, five days visiting the cultural high points of the Netherlands.

Undoubtedly the most surprising to me then, was the visit to the Kröller-Müller museum. An hour east of Amsterdam on the train, followed by twenty minutes on the bus, before entering the park and picking up one of the free white bikes to get around the expansive landscape of the Hoge Veluwe Park.  If I think back to that first visit I remember walking through pine forests and across dazzling sand dunes on a bright, crisp morning in early spring.  It wasn’t what I had expected of the Dutch landscape.  How different it was as a way to approach a museum art collection.  My more familiar routine was to battle through the busy streets of London making use of packed buses and underground trains.

Crossing this windswept Dutch landscape brought us to the destination that our tutors back in London had raved about, the elegant Kröller-Müller museum.  A stylish, modernist building housing the collection put together by Helene Kröller-Müller in the early years of the twentieth century and featuring the work of van Gogh, Mondriaan and many other modern masters.  Behind the museum you have an extensive and ever growing sculpture park and forest.

Little did I know when I made that first visit all those years ago, that within three years I would find myself living in the Netherlands and within biking distance of the park and the museum.  Regularly, as we did yesterday, we take our bikes and head off in a north-east direction.  It is a 20km ride through forests and over heathland.  As I said at the start, I’m yet to discover a better combination of physical exercise, landscape and art. The temporary exhibition for this particular visit being a rarely seen display of early van Gogh drawings.

Click here for more about the Kröller-Müller museum.

Getting closer to Mondriaan…..

I should start by saying that love was my main reason to move from England to the Netherlands back in the 1990s. But having said that, there were other reasons I was enthusiastic to travel over the North Sea and experience life here. Top of that list at the time was the affinity and fascination I had, and still have, for Dutch art. Top of my list was Vermeer, I’d grown to love his work from the four of his paintings that can be found in London at the National Gallery, the Queen’s collection and Kenwood House. But along with Vermeer there was Rembrandt, de Hooch, van Doesburg and Mondriaan to name but a handful. It is a very rich land when it comes to painting. Two decades later I am still discovering new things and perspectives on this particular piece of the history of art. Today being one such day of discovery. Two friends from England were over and staying near Amsterdam in a windmill on the eastern side of the city. Whilst looking up where exactly we had to get to in order to visit them I was coming across information that suggested that there was actually a Mondriaan connection. Having visited there today it was confirmed, this was a windmill that the artist painted in the days before he had settled into his more well-known abstract style of later in his career. In the early days though he was very much a painter of the flat Dutch landscape. And so from close up I came by a little more insight into this little corner of Dutch history of art, it’s kind of a nice feeling to have lunched in a place that seems to have changed very little since the artist painted his work back in the first decade of the twentieth century. Did Mondriaan also lunch in the subject of his work…..? Probably not I guess, but the sense of place is nice to take with me, next time I visit the painting in the Rijksmuseum or one of the other museums who have other paintings he made of the same mill.