In his excellent book, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, Michael White explained the struggle Mondrian went through during the War years. “What we think of as the first properly Neo-plastic painting were not made until after Mondrian returned to Paris in 1919. The war...
Trapped in Holland, Piet Mondrian joined an artist’s colony in Laren where he joined forces with painter Bart van der Leck and the leader of the De Stijl movement, Theo van Doesburg. Van Doesburg was an old friend who had praised Mondrian’s 1915 almost abstract work,...
During the Great War, Holland, a territory also called “The Netherlands,” was neural. Like Belgium, its neutrality was historic. but a principled or pragmatic stance on the part of a small weak nation was actually in the hands of the stronger nations that would use...
Like many artists of the Parisian avant-garde, Delaunay was disrupted by the sudden eruption of hostilities that totally changed the art world. Delaunay decided to not serve in the military and went to a neutral nation, Spain. For four years, he and Sonia...
There is nothing like the passage of time to cover rebellion with the warm patina of capitalism. Cubism, once unacceptable to the conventional art audience, Cubism glowed with the baptism of “history.” Due to its intellectualism and because of the tireless efforts of...
The pre-war discourse on Cubism had been written by artists, such as Gleizes and Metzinger, and by art critics, like Guillaume Apollinaire, and this pre-war body of work was developed from the perspective of those “present at the creation.” The seeds of the linking of...
