78. PIET MONDRIAN,
24 March - 30 June 1996
The exhibition on the career of Piet Mondrian (b. Amerfoort
1872, d. New York 1944) comprised altogether 51 works from the Gemeente
Museum in The Hague. The Gemeente Museum owns an important collection
of approximately 200 of Mondrian's works.
The exhibition presented a cross-section of works covering
Mondrian's artistic development, firstly as a realistic landscape painter
in the Dutch tradition, then as a Cubist and finally as a full-blooded
abstract artist, who constructed his works using black vertical and horizontal
axes together with red, yellow and blue. The exhibition also included
some rarely seen works from the artist's early period.
The exhibition concentrated specifically on Mondrian's
artistic development. The essential themes of Mondrian's early years were
the sea, the seashore with its piers and lighthouses as well as trees,
windmills and church facades seen against the sky.
It is presumed that Mondrian saw Cubist paintings for
the first time in the autumn of 1910 and that he started to use Cubist
methods immediately. He simplified nature's diversity in pictorial signs,
which became even more simplified. At the same time the dynamics of the
great axes of the landscape were reduced to a tension between the two
basic opponents, the horizontal and the vertical.
Mondrian's paintings from 1911-17 are a fascinating and
well planned series of works. They reveal the artist's single-minded progress
from nature motifs to complete abstraction.
In 1917 Mondrian reached a stage of pure abstraction in
his production. Nothing in his paintings was connected with the real
world.
Although Mondrian's works did not have a specific motif, they did not
lack meaning. Instead of depicting windmills or some other objects, the
artist wanted to describe universal harmony and universal laws which are
only partly visible but which dominate our world.
The exhibition was the first large display of Mondrian's
art in Finland. Following the exhibition in the Sara Hildén Art
Museum the works travelled to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
The exhibition was produced by Retretti Art Centre in
conjunction with Art Consulting Ars Baltica.
Geometric art from the collection of the Sara Hildén
Foundation was exhibited on the lower floor of the museum.
Catalogue:
Piet Mondrian
1996, 87 pages
Retretti Oy, Punkaharju
Oy Art Consulting Ars Baltica Ab, Helsinki
ISBN 951-8977-14-3
Not on sale
15,512 visitors attended the exhibition.
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