"Janssen's biography of the Dutch master is riveting and eloquent."
-Terence Trouillot, Artnet
Piet Mondrian: A Life is the first comprehensive biography of Piet
Mondrian to be published in English. This remarkable book provides a
long-overdue and compelling account of the life of perhaps the most
influential abstract artist of the 20th century. Hans Janssen, former
chief curator at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, draws on his own research and
that of a cohort of distinguished scholars, as well as previously
unknown letters, writings and archival materials, to reveal unexpected
new insights into the artist's life and the circles in which Mondrian
moved.
From his student days in Amsterdam to his life in Paris after the First
World War, to his time in London and New York from 1938 until his death,
Mondrian is here presented as someone in constant interaction with the
world around him. Far from a lonely, isolated figure as he is often
portrayed, he is revealed as an artist reacting to the emergence of
modernity and taking the lead in shaping art for the world in which we
now live. Translated into English in the 150th anniversary year of the
artist's birth, and already celebrated and anticipated in the New York
Times, this is a vital contribution to the scholarship on Mondrian as
well as on the development of abstract art.
A cofounder of the De Stijl movement and pioneer of 20th-century
abstraction, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) developed his
iconic style of Neoplasticism--a rigorously limited yet generative
language of straight lines and primary colors--out of a progressive
exploration of painting that took him from naturalistic landscape
painter to theoretician of geometric abstraction.
Hans Janssen (1954-2021) is the author of Piet Mondrian: The Man
Who Changed Everything and coauthor of The Story of De Stijl, and was
a curator of modern art at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.
