100th Anniversary of De Stijl: Tinker Redevelops the House where Mondrian was Born
26/03/2017.
[Amersfoort] Netherlands
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
metalocus, INÉS LALUETA
The Mondrian House in Amersfoort, Netherlands, has been renovated to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the De Stijl art movement. Tinker imagineers created and produced the multimedia concept and a new design for the interior, covering everything from entrance, café, and shop to routing and atmosphere.
In the house where Piet Mondrian was born, visitors walk through the life of this headstrong pioneer of abstract art: from Amersfoort to Winterswijk, and from Amsterdam via Paris and London to New York, his final destination. They get to know his iconic work, his spiritual formation, his interests, and his friends. And join him in his artistic quest.
Works
The journey starts with a video installation of Mondrian’s oeuvre. A musical picture story that takes the visitors from his early landscapes and colourful seascapes to the abstract world he is famous for. Accompanied by the contemporary music that he liked, from Ravel to Jazz, from Stravinsky to Boogie-Woogie.
New York
Mondrian spent his last years in New York, where he made a fresh start: he got rid of the black lines and explored new spaces in his work. Visitors enter Mondrian’s dream world, in which his work, the city, and his favourite music all melt together into one audio-visual spectacle.
Interior Design
The renovation of the interior was based on the concept of an empty canvas. When entering the Mondriaanhuis, you experience a white, bright space. Along the route through the museum, the canvas of his life is gradually filled in. The artistic signposts consist of large, coloured areas that refer to colours from his entire oeuvre, such as the dark greens or pinks from his early period. These have been hand painted in the layered structure that is characteristic of Mondrian.
Before long, work on the Mondriaanhuis will continue with, among other things, a trip along the highlights of his Dutch period, an upgrade of the Parisian studio and DIY studio, and an intermezzo in London.
Piet Cornelis Mondriaan. (Amersfoort, 7 March 1872 - New York, 1 February 1944). Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian, was a 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 neoplasticism. This consisted of white ground, upon which he painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the three primary colors.
Piet Mondrian’s name is linked to the Dutch Neo-Plasticist group associated with the periodical De Stijl. His conception that art should be represented through the straight line and pure colours as a symbol of the expression of the cosmic order made him one of the major advocates of abstraction and one of the most admired and influential artists of the twentieth century. Mondrian trained as a compulsory education drawing teacher and in 1892 enrolled at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, where he began to mix with the art groups of the day. His first works were serene landscapes painted in delicate shades of grey, mauve and dark green, and in 1908, influenced by the painter Jan Toorop, he began to experiment with brighter colours.
In 1912 Mondrian moved to Paris, where he met Fernand Léger and Georges Braque, among others. His spell in the French capital prompted him to adopt the Cubist style, from which he gradually turned towards abstraction. The outbreak of the First World War forced him to remain in the Netherlands, where he met Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg. In 1917, along with the two painters and a group of young architects and artists, he founded the De Stijl magazine, which until 1924 provided him with a vehicle for disseminating Neo-Plasticism, an art that sought to represent the absolute truths of the universe. From this point onwards Mondrian’s painting was expressed solely through planes of primary colours and straight lines. When Van Doesburg introduced the diagonal into his compositions in 1925, Mondrian left the group for good.
Mondrian later collaborated with the Cercle et Carré group established by Michel Seuphor in 1929 and joined August Herbin’s group Abstraction-Création in 1931. In 1938 he emigrated to London and in the autumn of 1940, after the air raids on the city and the German occupation of Paris, he decided to take up the American painter Harry Holtzman’s offer to go to New York. In America his style lost its previous rigidity, influenced by the intrinsic movement of the seething metropolis, its skyscrapers and jazz, and acquired a greater freedom and a livelier rhythm.