“Throughout adulthood,” writes Alexxa Gotthardt, “the artist Mondrian led an itinerant life, moving between Amsterdam, the Dutch countryside, Paris, London, and New York…. [And] on several occasions, moving sparked radical shifts in his work.
One such break came in the summer of 1914, when Mondrian returned to Holland after a two-year stint in Paris, where he’d been absorbing the tenets of Cubism. By leaving the Cubist hotbed, Mondrian was able to further develop his unique approach to abstraction…
Between 1914 and 1916, working from the small town of Domburg, Mondrian [then] developed a series of abstract drawings and paintings inspired by the facade of a local church… By 1918, grids filled with rectangular planes of color began to emerge on Mondrian’s canvases.”
Gotthardt suggests this is helpful advice for anyone seeking inspiration as an artist or in any aspect of our life, “consider,” she writes, “a change of context.” You never know what might emerge from that new context or where it might ultimately lead. For Mondrian changing contexts led to a style of art we now enjoy in museums around the world.
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