MONDRIAN
James Johnson Sweeney
James Johnson Sweeney: MONDRIAN. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1948. First edition. Slim quarto. Stapled printed wrappers 16 pp. 19 black and white illustrations. A fine, uncirculated copy.
7.25 x 9.25 staple-bound booklet with 16 pages and 19 black-and-white illustrations of Piet Mondrian’s work. Sweeney collected two of his pieces originally published in MoMA Bulletins in 1945 and 1946.
“[Mondrian’s] compositions” have had such a profound effect not only on art, but on our culture that we can’t even “see” them anymore. Mondrian summed up his paintings best when he said, "Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and color and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture.”
Dutch pioneer of abstract art Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) coined the term Neo-Plasticism to describe his rigorously geometric abstract paintings. Mondrian’s first one-man exhibition opened at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1909. He was influenced by Cubism — to the point of abstraction — during his residency in Paris from 1912 to 1914. Mondrian returned to Holland in 1914 and evolved a more simplified abstract style which he called Neo-Plasticism, restricted to the three primary colours and to a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines on a white ground; He associated with Theo van Doesburg in the de Stijl movement between 1917 to 1925. back in Paris from 1919 to 1938 he he joined the group Abstraction-Création in 1931. Mondrian emigrated to New York in 1940 where he continued to develop a more colorful style, with colored lines and syncopated rhythms.
“In past times when one lived in contact with nature, abstraction was easy; it was done unconsciously. Now in our denaturalized age abstraction becomes an effort.”