Dutch 1872-1944 Piet Mondrian Location was a Dutch painter. He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism. This consisted of a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the use of the three primary colours. When 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left his artistically conservative native Holland for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of Neo-Plasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Then again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London??s Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan. At 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final New York studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about again to create the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records, Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had ever inhabited. Tragically, he was there for only a few months: he died of pneumonia in February 1944.  Related Paintings of Piet Mondrian :. | fade away Chrysanthemum | Mill under the night | Tree | Sea and dock | Church |
Related Artists:
Lucas Cranach
Kronach 1472-Weimar 1553 German painter and engraver. The son of a painter, he settled in Wittenberg c.1504 and was court painter successively under three electors of Saxony. There he maintained a flourishing workshop and was twice burgomaster. Cranach was a close friend of Martin Luther, whose doctrine he upheld in numerous paintings and woodcuts, and he has been called the painter of the Reformation. He was a rapid and prolific painter, and the work turned out by his studio is uneven in quality. Naïve and fanciful, often awkward in draftsmanship, it has, nonetheless, freshness and originality and a warm, rich palette. His portraits are particularly successful. Among his best-known works are Repose in Egypt (Gemäldgalerie, Staatliche Mus., Berlin-Dahlem); Judgment of Paris (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe); Adam and Eve (Courtauld Inst., London); and Crucifixion (Weimar). The latter contains figures of Luther and Cranach. His many famous protraits include those of Elector John Frederick and Self-Portrait (Uffizi). Cranach was also an accomplished miniaturist. He produced a few copperplates and designs for woodcuts. His son and pupil Lucas Cranach, the Younger,
Kristian Zahrtmann
(31 March 1843 - 22 June 1917) was a Danish painter. He was a part of the Danish artistic generation in the late 19th century, along with Peder Severin Krøyer and Theodor Esbern Philipsen, who broke away from both the strictures of traditional Academicism and the heritage of the Golden Age of Danish Painting, in favor of naturalism and realism. He was known especially for his history paintings, and especially those depicting strong, tragic, legendary women in Danish history. He also produced works of many other genres including landscapes, street scenes, folk scenes and portraits. He had a far-reaching effect on the development of Danish art through his effective support of individual style among his students during the many years he taught, and by his pioneering use of color.
William Trost Richards
(June 3, 1833 - April 17, 1905) was an American landscape artist associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement. William Trost Richards was born on 3 June 1833 in Philadelphia. In 1846 and 1847 he attended the local Central High School. Between 1850 and 1855 he studied part-time with the German artist Paul Weber while working as designer and illustrator of ornamental metalwork. Richards first public showing was part of an exhibition in New Bedford, Massachusetts, organized by artist Albert Bierstadt in 1858. In 1862 he was elected honorary member of the National Academy of Design and Academician in 1871. In 1863, he became a member of the Association of the Advanced of Truth in Art, an American Pre-Raphaelite group. In 1866, he departed for Europe for one year. Upon his return and for the following six years he spent the summers on the East Coast. In the 1870s, he produced many acclaimed watercolor views of the White Mountains, several of which are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Richards exhibited at the National Academy of Design from 1861 to 1899 and at the Brooklyn Art Association from 1863 to 1885. He was elected a full member of the National Academy in 1871. Richards rejected the romanticized and stylized approach of other Hudson River painters and instead insisted on meticulous factual renderings. His views of the White Mountains are almost photographic in their realism. In later years, Richards painted almost exclusively marine watercolors. His works are featured today in many important American museums, including the National Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Fogg Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.