"Piet Mondrian wanted to create sheer beauty"

Mondrian & De Stijl have, from September, a permanent home base in the Netherlands with the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag dedicating an entire 750m2 wing to the artist and the movement.  Hans Janssen, chief curator of the museum, explains the project in detail.

Could you explain the process of gathering the materials and information for this exhibit? How long have you been planning it?

We have been planning the exhibition actively since one and a half year. We started writing on the book in 2009, and the preparation for the exhibition, which is mainly from the collection of the Gemeentemuseum, started early in 2010.

To what extent did De Stijl movement play a pivotal role in the European Avant-Garde?

De Stijl played a very important role in the European avant-garde for two reasons. The first was that Mondrian was already experimenting with the idea of his abstract art already since 1908, maybe earlier. So when he came out in the open with it, in 1917, in the magazine, his ideas had been crystallized perfectly, and overpowered and overwhelmed his fellow artists all over Europe. A little bit like Einstein's theory of relativity, or Darwin's idea of evolution, which they had also quite a long incubation time. The second reason was that Theo van Doesburg (founder of De Stijl) was very active all over Europe in making contacts with artists, critics, magazines and galleries. He operated a bit like young people today, with all kinds of media.

Which particular stylistic features were specific to Piet Mondrian?

Piet Mondrian wanted to create sheer beauty with the help of the most extreme oppositions in the realm of drawing (horizontal/vertical lines,straight) and the biggest contrasts one can obtain in color (red, yellow, blue, white, grey, black).

The essence of De Stijl was finding a new art form that could be functionally applied within society. Do you think the movement achieved this goal?

The exhibition and the accompanying book prove that without De Stijl the contemporary world would look quite differently.

"The rationale of De Stijl was typically Dutch". Could you explain this statement?

Most of the avant-garde movements in the 20th century were born in cities, in metropolis. De Stijl was born in a small village, in Laren -Holland-, when Van Doesburg visited Mondrian. Also, within De Stijl, there is a strange discrepancy between 'artificiality' (the features of De Stijl) and the 'natural' (the context where De Stijl emerged). So for example the Rietveld-Schröder House in Utrecht was projected on the outskirts of town, within immediate reach of orchards, meadows, canals and rows of trees that characterized the Dutch landscape.