Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 327

This is the grave of Piet Mondrian.

Pieter Mondriaan was born in 1872 in the Netherlands, only changing his name slightly in the late 1900s. I am the first person to admit that I don’t know too much about the fine art world, so let me just make a couple of points and leave it to the commenters. He grew up in a very strict Calvinist background but broke away from that and not only became a painting prodigy but also one with avant-garde tendencies, and he moved to Paris to integrate himself in that in 1911. Before that, he was based in Amsterdam and deeply interested in spiritualism, which also influenced his art. He experimented with cubism for awhile, but really became famous after World War I for his grid-based paintings, a hallmark of modernism. He went far to define this type of painting, a theoretical move as much as an artistic one and one that would often leave regular people a bit befuddled about what this art meant. At least Picasso and so on made paintings that looked weird. These were just lines. But hey, what do I know, since lots of people love this and it is still influential in the design world. Mondrian moved to New York during this period, where he would live the rest of his life.

Let’s look at some of Mondrian’s work:

Composition No. 10, 1939-42

Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930

Tableau I, 1921

Victory Boogie Woogie, 1942-44

Piet Mondrian died in 1944 of pneumonia. He is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other artists who were close to Mondrian, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Robert Motherwell is in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for instance. Previous posts in this series are archived here.