Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, after 1912 Mondrian (March 7, 1872 – February 1, 1944), was a Dutch painter.

Mondrian was born in Amersvoort, Holland and lived there for the first eight years of his life. His father Pieter Cornelis Sr. was headmaster of an elementary school, a gifted draftsman and amateur artist. Uncle Frits Mondrian was a self-taught painter and commercially successful, even the Russian court bought his work.

The Mondrians, devout Calvinists, were an artistic family who painted and made music and Mondrian Sr. could afford a decent education for his four children.
Piet Jr. proved to have a talent for drawing. His father gave him drawing lessons and took his son to the countryside to sketch. Uncle Frits taught him the basics of painting.

As a teenager Mondrian was thoroughly educated in drawing and visited several schools. Mondrian Sr. intended his son to become a drawing teacher so that Piet would be able to make a living. Mondrian won his licences and was allowed to teach at primary and secondary schools.

Despite his father’s demands, Mondrian decided to become an artist, not a teacher, in 1892. His father could’t, but Uncle Frits managed to obtain an allowance for Piet at the National Academy of Art in Amsterdam, Mondrian was 20 when he moved to Amsterdam.

There he studied either full time or attended evening classes and joined several artist’s societies where he exhibited his work, for the first time in 1893. He got some commissions, like a ceiling painting and he applied for several prizes, with varying degree of success. In 1903 he won his first prize from the “Arti et Amicitae Society”.

Traveling back and forth between Amsterdam and various parts of rural Holland he paintied landscapes, first in the style of the “The Hague School”, then gradually more and more abstract, omitting details he regarded as irrelevant. The more abstract his work became, the more appreciation and recognition he gained from fellow artists and other forward thinking contemporaries. At the same time he met some criticism from Dutch art critics.

In 1909 Mondrian joined a theosophical society, which became the foundation of his thinking and the intellectual side of his art. In these years Mondrian begins to resemble Rasputin in appearance and he meditates, although later his appearance changes again, making him a sharply dressed man.

In his work this translates into his initial interest in the quasi random and disorderly quality of nature, which then changes into his well known paintings that consist of horizontal and vertical lines.

In his neo-plasticism he aimed to create a balance between the horizontal and the vertical, in tune with the laws of the universe, as he saw them, and his theosophical believes. The horizontal representing femininity and the worldly, the vertical masculinity and the spiritual.

Around 1909 he came to be regarded as one of the leaders of the Dutch avant-garde, of course still getting bad journalistic criticism. In 1910 he became a full member of the jury of an art society.

In 1911 he was exposed for the first time by the works of the cubists Braque and Picasso, at an exhibition in Amsterdam. This probably made him want to move to Paris, the center of French art and cubism. Arriving in Paris in 1912, he quickly became internationally famous with exhibitions in Paris and Berlin.

Mondrian lived in Montparnasse, near the Eiffel Tower and enjoyed the city, with it’s exhibitions, parties and night-life. Piet Mondrian sold little in Paris, but made a living copying famous paintings from the Louvre.

When World War I began in 1914, Mondrian had returned to Holland to visit his father who was mortally ill. His father died in 1915. That year Mondrian moved to Laren, Holland, to an artist’s community. There, artist Van Doesburg brought together a group of artists that contributed to the magazine called “De Stijl” (The Style) for which Mondrian wrote a few articles.

They were of the opinion that artists, architects and sculptors should work together to create a new society that would be in tune with “the laws of the universe”. The art that went with it should be clear in form and spiritual, as opposed to earthly. Natural forms were earthly, straight lines and angles spiritual.
Now “De Stijl” is known as an art movement, almost synonymous with the red, yellow and blue neo-plasticism paintings of Piet Mondrian.

Mondrian returned to Paris in 1919, where he published Le Néo-Plasticisme, containing his essays written for “De Stijl”. The book was translated in German in 1925.

During his years in Paris, Mondrian’s reputation as an international representative of abstract art grew, but with art-insiders particularly. His paintings still didn’t fetch high prices as they never would during his lifetime.

After Hitler had come to power in 1933, Mondrian’s work was put on the list of Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art). Presumably having learned from his experiences during World War I, in which he had to leave all his paintings in Paris, Mondrian left France in September 1938, and lived for two years in London, and In October 1940, Mondrian went to America, where he had his finest years as an artist.

In 1944, at age 71, Piet Mondrian died of pneumonia in a New York hospital.