Piet Mondrian
Reduced painting to black lines, white ground and three primary colours, and got there step by step.
Piet Mondrian was born at Amersfoort in 1872 and painted Dutch windmills, dunes and trees in a naturalistic manner for twenty years before anything changed. Paris and Cubism began the reduction around 1912; the tree paintings show it happening. Stranded in the Netherlands by the First World War, he founded De Stijl with Theo van Doesburg in 1917 and arrived at Neoplasticism: horizontals, verticals, black lines, white ground, and red, blue and yellow only. He left Paris for London in 1938 and New York in 1940, where Broadway Boogie Woogie broke the black line into colour. He died in 1944.
The classical grid paintings are almost entirely institutional and rarely trade, and the naturalistic early work is a distinct market in its own right that is regularly underestimated because it does not look like a Mondrian. Both are unique. He reworked pictures over years and re-dated them, so an inscribed date can post-date the canvas beneath it. The white grounds have yellowed unevenly and past restoration has sometimes been heavy-handed. The RKD and the standing catalogue raisonne are the references, and reproductions of the grids are everywhere.
If you own a work by Piet Mondrian
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.