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How influences of western esotericism in art are influenced by family networks

Art is not only the product of artistic inspiration, it is also determined by the social context of an artist. The avant-garde was ideologically determined by Western Esotericism, especially spiritualism, modern theosophy and anthroposophy. Genealogical methods uncover networks of artists, which not only run ‘vertically’ in generations, but also in ‘horizontal’ lines between families.
Text in Dutch.

Mondrian's Passions

No artist has changed the face of modern art, design and architecture more fundamentally than the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. During his career Mondrian slowly but surely evolved from a traditional 19th century realist painter to the prime pioneer of pure abstraction.
Post-war art historians and critics have always depicted Mondrian as an odd hermit, socially shy and introverted, with a frame of thinking as rectilinear as his art and his Calvinist upbringing.
But how true to his life is this image really?
This book is about Mondrian’s true passions: how painting, the struggle with outward appearance and painterly substance, becomes the inner expression of a view on life; how writing about painting evaluates ideas and development; and the cultivation an extensive social network to reach out to the world.
Mondrian’s message can be condensed into the magical amount of seven words: Art is passion, and passion is life.
This book contains a selection of seminal essays on Mondrian, published in international exhibition catalogues and books between 1994 and 2014, in various languages.

The painting methods of Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck

De Stijl movement never was a coherent group. Analysis of the painting methods of Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg and Bart van de Leck reveal why.

  

How genealogy explains Theo van Doesburg's alias

The real name of the artist Theo van Doesburg, most active propagator of the De Stijl movement, was Christian Emil Marie Küpper. How and why did this Emil Küpper decide on his alias? Genealogy has all the answers.

 

'Character is destiny' - Piet Mondrian and his horoscope

Recently the Netherlands Institute for Art History acquired the Harry Holtzman Estate on Piet Mondrian. Among the very few documents Mondrian preserved until his death is an interesting one: the horoscope Mondrian had drawn for him late 1911-early 1912.

Already in 1993-1994, as I was working on the exhibition Piet Mondrian 1892-1914. The Amsterdam Years in the Amsterdam City Archives – now housed in the building designed by Mondrian’s co-theosophist Karel de Bazel – I had several talks with my colleague Robert Welsh about the horoscope. I wondered which insights Mondrian had drawn from it, concerning his personality and his career. Judging from the vast network I uncovered during my investigations, it had become clear that Mondrian was not the stiff, introverted man he has always been judged to be. A better characterization would be: a solitary person among his fellow people, someone who weaved in and out of social circles in a receptive and playful, but at the same time reserved, independent and reflexive way. ‘Piet, now you see him, now you don’t’, was the jokey description of him at gallery openings in Paris.

Yesterday, on 7 March 2013, the birthday of Mondrian, the website www.mondriaan.nl was launched. Posthumously Mondrian received an impressive and modern birthday present. In another way Mondrian himself celebrated his birthday on 7 March 1908 by treating himself to the lecture Rudolf Steiner gave in Amsterdam. He kept the Dutch transcription of Steiner’s lectures all his life, together with his horoscope. Apparently they meant much to him.

The Victory Boogie Woogie - a corpse dissected

Last week I received a review copy from the Amsterdam University Press: a new book on Piet Mondrian, Inside Out Victory Boogie Woogie, edited by Maarten van Bommel, Hans Janssen and Ron Spronk. Mondrian started on the painting Victory Boogie Woogie in 1942, but it stayed unfinished because of his death in February 1944. The painting was bought in 1998 from the collector Samuel Irving Newhouse at a whopping price of 82 million Guilders (approx. 37 million Euro’s) through a gift of the Dutch National Bank to commemorate the introduction of the Euro in the Netherlands. The acquisition caused a public outrage, and even the House of Representatives raised questions about the way it was acquired. But now the painting is on victorious display in the Gemeentemuseum of the Hague, and is by now a prominent attraction of the museum.