GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Even in his own lifetime, Piet Mondrian was lauded as the founder of the most modern, avant-garde art movement of the 20th century. Nevertheless, before he developed Neo-Plasticism, in which pictorial elements are reduced to a black grid on a white ground with contained fields of primary colors, he enjoyed a successful career as a figurative painter. In 1917 he began a series of works depicting an old windmill near his home on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Seen from a low, close vantage point, the motif was a constant through which Mondrian explored dramatic color and lighting effects. In Windmill, the expressive application of cool blue tones in broad, visible brushstrokes reveals his absorption of avant-garde styles like Symbolism and Post-Impressionism, which he had seen in Paris before the outbreak of World War I.
Excerpt from
DMA label copy.
NOTES
c. 1917 (reprise of a compositional series from 1908-1910)
The eleven works by Piet Mondrian in the Museum's collection illustrate his transformation from post-impressionist landscape painter to austere abstractionist. In Farm Near Duivendrecht, in the Evening and Windmill, Mondrian describes the dramatic lighting of the flat Dutch countryside with a sensuous, painterly touch. In Apple Tree, Pointillist Version, he expresses a growing interest in the vocabulary of cubism and the underlying structures of nature. His assertive network of linear forms breaks the natural motif into an organic grid. By the time Mondrian painted Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow and Gray, this grid had become a precise yet flexible armature for each new composition. During the final phase of Mondrian's career, he moved to New York as he fled the chaos of war. In paintings from this period, such Place de la Concorde, he gradually incorporated color directly into the grid, along with a new, syncopated rhythm inspired by jazz music and the urban fabric of the twentieth-century city.
Bonnie Pitman, ed., "Windmill," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 245.
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Place of origin: Amsterdam (Netherlands): TGN: 7006952
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FUN FACTS
- "I find a mill like that really beautiful. Especially when, as now, it is so close that we don’t have the distance to see it or paint it in the field of a normal perspective. It is very hard to render plastically anything seen so close up: one has to resort to a freer type of expression.”—Piet Mondrian
- Another one of Mondrian's windmill paintings (1982.25.FA), is also part of the Dallas Museum of Art's permanent collection.
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General Description
Even in his own lifetime, Piet Mondrian was lauded as the founder of the most modern, avant-garde art movement of the 20th century. Nevertheless, before he developed Neo-Plasticism, in which pictorial elements are reduced to a black grid on a white ground with contained fields of primary colors, he enjoyed a successful career as a figurative painter. In 1917 he began a series of works depicting an old windmill near his home on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Seen from a low, close vantage point, the motif was a constant through which Mondrian explored dramatic color and lighting effects. In Windmill, the expressive application of cool blue tones in broad, visible brushstrokes reveals his absorption of avant-garde styles like Symbolism and Post-Impressionism, which he had seen in Paris before the outbreak of World War I.
Excerpt from
DMA label copy.
Fun Facts
- "I find a mill like that really beautiful. Especially when, as now, it is so close that we don’t have the distance to see it or paint it in the field of a normal perspective. It is very hard to render plastically anything seen so close up: one has to resort to a freer type of expression.”—Piet Mondrian
- Another one of Mondrian's windmill paintings (1982.25.FA), is also part of the Dallas Museum of Art's permanent collection.
Archival Resources
Web Resources
Notes
c. 1917 (reprise of a compositional series from 1908-1910)
The eleven works by Piet Mondrian in the Museum's collection illustrate his transformation from post-impressionist landscape painter to austere abstractionist. In Farm Near Duivendrecht, in the Evening and Windmill, Mondrian describes the dramatic lighting of the flat Dutch countryside with a sensuous, painterly touch. In Apple Tree, Pointillist Version, he expresses a growing interest in the vocabulary of cubism and the underlying structures of nature. His assertive network of linear forms breaks the natural motif into an organic grid. By the time Mondrian painted Composition with Large Blue Plane, Red, Black, Yellow and Gray, this grid had become a precise yet flexible armature for each new composition. During the final phase of Mondrian's career, he moved to New York as he fled the chaos of war. In paintings from this period, such Place de la Concorde, he gradually incorporated color directly into the grid, along with a new, syncopated rhythm inspired by jazz music and the urban fabric of the twentieth-century city.
Bonnie Pitman, ed., "Windmill," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 245.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Place of origin: Amsterdam (Netherlands): TGN: 7006952
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
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PROVENANCE
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