Piet Mondrian’s Groundbreaking Abstraction
A cornerstone of modern art and one of the earliest innovators of European abstraction, Mondrian refined his mature style in Paris during the 1920s and early 1930s. Well known in international art circles at the time, the Dutch painter counted Peggy Guggenheim and Alfred Barr among his patrons, and artists such as Hilla Rebay and Marcel Duchamp made frequent visits to his immaculate studio. Alexander Calder visited in 1930, the year Composition No. II was produced, and later recalled: “I was very much moved by Mondrian’s studio, large, beautiful and irregular in shape as it was, with the walls painted white and divided by black lines and rectangles of bright color, like his paintings.”