50 Fun Facts About Piet Mondrian

A German museum admitted in 2022 that Mondrian's New York City I had hung which way for decades?

Upside down is how it has hung since at least 1980. The museum decided to leave it that way, fearing the fragile work could fall apart if it were turned.

Which Disney cartoon so charmed Piet Mondrian that he signed postcards as one of its characters?

Snow White delighted him when he saw it in Paris in early 1938. He later sent his brother Carel a whole series of postcards of the film, signing one Sleepy and calling Carel Sneezy.

Which French designer's 1965 collection starred shift dresses based on Piet Mondrian's paintings?

Yves Saint Laurent made the six cocktail dresses from separate pieces of dyed fabric rather than prints. They were copied so widely that he grew disenchanted with his own hit.

Which three colours, plus black, white and gray, did Piet Mondrian allow in his mature paintings?

Red, yellow and blue were the only hues he kept, and he paired them with just two directions: horizontal and vertical. He believed such strict limits could express a universal beauty.

Piet Mondrian built the seats and tables of his last New York studio from which discarded items?

Fruit crates that once held oranges and apples became his furniture, painted the same off-white as the walls. He called the studio the best space he had ever lived in.

Which 1970s TV series featured a tour bus painted in a pattern inspired by Piet Mondrian's grids?

The Partridge Family, a singing clan led by a widowed mother, repainted an old 1957 school bus for their concert trips. The series never explains why they chose the pattern.

Which finished Piet Mondrian painting of 1943 echoes Manhattan's street grid and the jazz piano he loved?

Broadway Boogie Woogie was bought for $800 by the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, who later gave it to the Museum of Modern Art. Its many small squares pulse like city lights.

Which creature did Piet Mondrian fear so much that he screamed on spotting one at a concert?

A spider was the culprit: he had dozed off during the music and screamed loudly when he woke and saw it. As a boy he also feared eye injuries so much that he refused to play with his brothers.

Which letter did Piet Mondrian drop from his Dutch surname after moving to Paris in 1912?

One A went missing: born Mondriaan, he became Mondrian to mark his break with the Netherlands and his arrival in the Parisian avant-garde.

Which evening pastime was Piet Mondrian's favourite thing to do, from his Amsterdam days onwards?

Dancing took him to jazz clubs well into his sixties. Friends were less keen: he waltzed very slowly with his body almost rigid, and one called him a terrible partner.

Which art movement, named after its own journal, did Piet Mondrian co-found in 1917?

De Stijl was also the title of the group's magazine, and its ideas soon spread from canvas to furniture and architecture. Its geometry went on to influence the Bauhaus and interior design.

Piet Mondrian broke with his movement in the mid-1920s after its leader championed which kind of line?

Diagonal strokes were more vital than upright ones, his co-founder argued. Mondrian, who allowed only horizontals and verticals, would not accept it and left the group.

Piet, named after Piet Mondrian, is an esoteric kind of what, written in blocks of colour, not text?

A programming language called Piet turns code into pictures that look like abstract art. Its creator wanted to name it Mondrian, but other software had already taken that name.

Before he turned abstract, what did Piet Mondrian's early Dutch paintings mostly show?

Landscapes filled his early career: windmills, fields and rivers in a naturalistic or Impressionist manner. His first exhibition came in 1893, decades before the famous grids.

Which event stranded Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands for years during a visit home from Paris?

World War I broke out while he was visiting in 1914, and he could not return to France until it ended. Cut off from the avant-garde, he began working out an abstract idiom of his own.

Which art movement did Piet Mondrian embrace in Paris from 1912, then treat as a stepping stone?

Cubism, the fractured manner of Picasso and Braque, showed up in his work almost at once. His pictures of 1912 dissolve into geometric shapes and interlocking planes.

Which doll wore a miniature of the famous 1965 Mondrian dress in a 2018 collector's collection?

Barbie modelled it in a set made by Mattel with the couturier's museum, alongside a 1968 safari jacket and a 1983 evening gown. An original dress hangs in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum.

Which Dutch city's Kunstmuseum holds the world's largest collection of Piet Mondrian's work?

The Hague marked his movement's hundredth year by adorning its City Hall with reproductions of his work, calling the result the largest Mondrian painting in the world.

In which Dutch city was Piet Mondrian born, in a house that is now a museum bearing his name?

Amersfoort, in the province of Utrecht, keeps his birthplace as the Mondriaan House. Inside is a recreation of the Paris studio he worked in during the 1920s.

Which illness killed Piet Mondrian in New York in 1944, leaving his last painting unfinished?

Pneumonia took him at 71, three days after he last worked on the canvas. Nearly 200 mourners came to his memorial, among them Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger.

Which artist reviewed a Piet Mondrian exhibition in 1915, then launched a journal with him in 1917?

Theo van Doesburg edited the magazine and also wrote Dadaist poetry under invented names. The two men's friendship ran mostly by letter until both were living in Paris.

What name did Piet Mondrian give his theory of pure abstract art, set out in essays from 1917?

Neoplasticism first appeared in twelve instalments of his movement's journal in 1917 and 1918. A short French book on the theory, Le Néo-Plasticisme, followed in Paris in 1920.

Which spiritual movement did Piet Mondrian join in 1909 and credit as the source of his ideas?

Theosophy taught that a deeper knowledge of nature lay beyond the senses, and he spent his life seeking it in paint. He joined the society's Dutch branch and stayed committed.

To which city did Piet Mondrian move in 1938, leaving Paris in the face of advancing fascism?

London kept him for two years, in a Hampstead room found for him by the painter Ben Nicholson. When the bombing began in 1940 he sailed on to America.

Which profession had Piet Mondrian already qualified for when he entered Amsterdam's art academy?

Schoolteacher was his first career: he taught in primary education and painted on the side. His father, a qualified drawing instructor, had introduced him to art early.

What did Piet Mondrian keep painting in secret into the 1920s, saying it was only for money?

Flowers, usually a single bloom, were his private sideline at a time when abstraction made such pictures seem taboo. He had begun painting them around 1900.

Which subject did Piet Mondrian paint at dusk in 1908, then strip to bare lines in later versions?

A tree spreads across Evening, the first of a series. In later versions he simplified the branches step by step until little more than vertical and horizontal strokes remained.

Whose gift bought Piet Mondrian's unfinished last painting for the Netherlands in the late 1990s?

The Dutch Central Bank gave the 80 million guilders to mark the coming of the euro. It was then the costliest purchase ever made for a museum in the Netherlands, and parliament asked questions.

Katherine Dreier ranked Piet Mondrian as Holland's third great painter after Rembrandt and whom?

Vincent van Gogh came second in her list, written for a 1926 exhibition in Brooklyn. She had just bought one of Mondrian's diamond-shaped canvases from his Paris studio.

A 1930 visit to Piet Mondrian's Paris studio pushed which sculptor to embrace abstract art fully?

Alexander Calder said the visit shocked him. Impressed by the room itself, he soon built the first of the moving sculptures that became his signature.

Which American rock band named their second album after the art movement Piet Mondrian co-founded?

The White Stripes released the record in 2000, with a cover that poses the duo among flat rectangles and lines. Jack White liked how the artists reduced art to its simplest parts.

Which word begins the title of Piet Mondrian's painting 'No. II', sold for $51 million in 2022?

Composition was a favourite title of his, followed by a number or the colours used, so no subject distracts from the grid. No. II is a canvas just 20 inches square.

What did Piet Mondrian use in New York to rearrange a painting's lines before committing to paint?

Coloured tape let him shift a line again and again until the balance felt right. Research on his final canvas found he reworked it radically this way shortly before he died.

Which sport's La Vie Claire team wore kit inspired by Piet Mondrian's paintings in the 1980s?

Road cycling fans knew the jerseys from the Tour de France, where the riders stood out in the peloton. The team's equipment sponsor, Look, used a Mondrian-style logo too.

Which brand released a 2008 skateboarding sneaker inspired by Piet Mondrian's paintings?

Nike gave its Dunk Low SB model the look. A smartphone maker followed in 2022 with a special edition that worked his paintings into the design of the handset.

Which designer of Utrecht's Schröder House shared Piet Mondrian's movement yet never met him?

Gerrit Rietveld built the house in 1924 for a client who wanted a home without walls. The group's members mostly kept in touch by letter, so the two never crossed paths.

Piet Mondrian, Chagall and Kandinsky all had confiscated work displayed in which 1937 Nazi exhibition?

Degenerate Art put 650 seized works on show in dark, narrow rooms, many unframed and partly covered by insulting slogans. Most were by Germans, but foreign modernists were pilloried too.

Which watch brand honoured Piet Mondrian with a model made with Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum?

Swatch based the watch on one of his late New York City pictures. A second Mondrian model followed in 2022, made with another museum.

Friends said Piet Mondrian was fascinated by which women's fashion items, the brighter the better?

Shoes caught his eye, though he never explained why. The same friends darned his socks on evenings together, and he gave them one of his paintings as a wedding present.

Which fellow painter's use of only primary colours greatly influenced Piet Mondrian from 1916?

Bart van der Leck's precise method reshaped his own technique, Mondrian wrote after a meeting in 1916. The pair later disagreed, and Van der Leck went back to painting from real subjects.

Which British artist influenced the double lines in Piet Mondrian's paintings of the 1930s?

Marlow Moss was a friend and fellow abstract painter, and each shaped how the other used the device. Mondrian felt the doubled line gave his pictures a new dynamism.

Which young American artist brought Piet Mondrian to New York, paid his rent and became his heir?

Harry Holtzman had crossed the Atlantic years earlier just to meet his hero. After Mondrian died he traced the studio's wall arrangements so they could be rebuilt and exhibited.

Which relative, a painter named Frits, often drew with the young Piet Mondrian along the river Gein?

His uncle Frits Mondriaan had studied under the painter Willem Maris, and the riverside sessions were part of an early art education. Piet grew up surrounded by drawing.

Which French luxury house sold 1930s bags inlaid with leather squares inspired by Piet Mondrian?

Hermès owed the range to its designer Lola Prusac, who borrowed from his latest canvases three decades before fashion's famous Mondrian dress. She later founded her own label.

Which Australian band put a tribute to a Piet Mondrian grid on the cover of Young Modern in 2007?

Silverchair used the artwork for their fifth and final album. The same design returns in three dimensions in the video for one of its singles.

In which Dutch town did Piet Mondrian spend his youth, living there from the age of eight to twenty?

Winterswijk became home when his father took a new post in the town. The house where he grew up now holds a museum in his name.

Which food regime, which bans mixing protein and starches, did Piet Mondrian follow in his sixties?

The Hay diet was no fad to him: he called it scientific dietetics. Friends teased him about his meagre rations of carrots and raisins.

Which 1960s sitcom's title sequence shows a Piet Mondrian painting hanging in a New York penthouse?

Green Acres opens with Eva Gabor singing her part of the theme song in the apartment, the Mondrian on the wall behind her. The absurdist comedy ran from 1965 to 1971.

Piet Mondrian's finished 1942 painting New York City hangs in which Paris museum of modern art?

Centre Pompidou visitors see the version he completed, a lattice of bright lines that interlace to suggest depth. An unfinished sister picture belongs to a German museum.

From which port did Piet Mondrian sail for New York in September 1940 aboard the liner Samaria?

Liverpool was his exit from wartime Europe, on a Cunard White Star ship. A friend was waiting on the pier when he landed in early October.