The Move to Amsterdam

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (or Mondrian, as he later spelled his name) was born in Amersfoort on 7 March 1872. His father was a primary school teacher; his mother looked after the five children. In 1880 the family moved to Winterswijk, where they were visited each summer by Uncle Frits, a landscape painter based in The Hague. Piet also wanted to be an artist but his father insisted that he should start by qualifying as an art teacher. As soon as he had done that, he moved to Amsterdam to train at the Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten (State Academy of Fine Arts).

In November 1892, Mondrian moved into a room over a publishing business in the Kalverstraat (no. 154). Unable to pay for his studies himself, he summoned up all his courage and wrote to the Royal House. It worked: Queen Emma awarded him a grant. At the Academy, he learned to copy Old Masters, attended life drawing classes, studied art theory and painted still lifes. He graduated in 1895.

Mondrian then moved to the Ruysdaelkade in Amsterdam and started to earn a living by teaching drawing and painting, illustrating scientific books and accepting commissions. At the same time, he experimented with loosely painted landscapes, at first mainly in subdued greens and browns, but before long in brighter colours. His canvases began to find serious buyers and he moved house again, for example to Watergraafsmeer (then still a separate municipality) and to Amsterdam’s Albert Cuypstraat (number 158).

After a brief interval of rural life in the village of Uden (Brabant), he returned to the art world of Amsterdam in 1905 –in time to experience the violent wake-up call of Jan Sluijters’ return from Paris and introduction of a vibrant new style of painting in 1907. Mondrian was to give this new style his own twist in paintings like Evening; The Red Tree (1908-1910).

The artists who adopted the new approach set up their own association called the ‘Moderne Kunstkring’. A large proportion of the buying public abandoned them; Mondrian’s Mill; Mill in Sunlight (1908) was vilified and his uncle Frits disowned him. It didn’t stop him from continuing to experiment. The only way was forward!

In 1911 he painted The Grey Tree, reducing his previously bright palette to grey, black and white, and switching his focus to the interplay of lines and the rhythm it created. His new approach met with incomprehension in Amsterdam and in 1911 – at the age of 39 – Mondrian decided that a move to the modern art capital of Europe was imperative. Amsterdam was too slow for him; Paris was where it was at!