Author Description

Marking the 150th anniversary of the artist's birth, the Fondation Beyeler will devote an exhibition to the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Mondrian shaped the evolution of painting from figuration to abstraction. His early work was influenced not only by late 19th century Dutch landscape painting but also by Symbolism and Cubism. It was only in the early 1920s that he began concentrating on a wholly non-representational pictorial vocabulary consisting solely of rectilinear arrangements of black lines on a white background and the three primary colours blue, red and yellow. While the collection of the Fondation Beyeler focuses primarily on works from the later phases of Mondrian's career, the exhibition will look at his development as an artist up to the 1920s and the stylistic genesis of his later work. Separate sections will deal with motifs such as windmills, dunes and seascapes, the farmstead reflected in water and plants in various states of abstraction.