Piet Mondrian: Realism and Abstraction

The AMAM collection is known for works by artists made early in their careers. One outstanding example is Piet Mondrian’s Brabant Farmyard, created in 1904 during the time when the artist was highly influenced by the naturalism of the nineteenth-century Dutch artists of the Hague School. Mondrian, however, is certainly best known for his later, iconic, abstract works made up of rectangular fields formed by black, white, and the primary colors red, yellow, and blue. 

The generous loan of Abstraction from the Kimbell Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas allows for museum visitors to better appreciate two distinct phases of the artist’s career. In each, Mondrian worked alongside his countrymen – at first the artists of the Hague School and later those of the De Stijl movement – while formulating his own particular approach both to realism and to abstraction.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

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Whether you go or not, Piet Mondrian: Life and Work brings together more than 230 superb paintings with documentary images from the artist’s life. The less-well-known work that Mondrian did in the 30 years before his breakthrough to abstraction—especially his landscape and flvower paintings—is remarkably beautiful, and to see it arranged chronologically is to enter the mind of an artist who is constantly looking for the next step that will take him from traditional realism to a universal vision of color and form. The book includes rare photographs of Mondrian’s studios in Paris and New York City as well as reproductions of more than 1,000 known works of Mondrian’s in black and white.