Piet Mondrian. A Life

Piet Mondrian: A Life is the first dedicated biography of Piet Mondrian to be published in English. Hans Janssen’s remarkable book provides a long overdue, in-depth and compelling account of the life of perhaps the most influential abstract artist of the 20th century. Janssen, former chief curator at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag – home to the world’s largest collection of Mondrian works – 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 he moved. From his student years in Amsterdam to his life in Paris in the years 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 the lonely, isolated figure he is often portrayed as, immersing himself in the purity of abstraction to mask his feelings, Mondrian is revealed as an artist reacting to the emergence of modernity and who took the lead in shaping art for the world in which we now live. Translated into English on the 150th anniversary year of the artist’s birth, Piet Mondrian: A Life is a vital contribution to the scholarship on Mondrian as well as the wider history of the development of abstract art.