MONDRIAN : COMPOSITION RBY

Pieter Cornelis (Piet) Mondriaan, after 1912 Mondrian, ( 1872– 1944) was a Dutch painter. He was an important contributor to the De Stijl (The Style) art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism . In 1912, Mondrian moved to Paris and changed his name (dropping an 'a' from Mondriaan) to emphasize his departure from life in the "artistic backwater" of Holland.

While in Paris, the influence of the style Cubism of Picasso and Braque appeared almost immediately in Mondrian's work. Paintings such as The Sea (1912) and his various studies of trees from that year still contain a measure of representation, but they are increasingly dominated by the geometric shapes and interlocking planes commonly found in Cubism.

Mondrian achieved full artistic maturity about 1921 and then he went on painting the same picture. His public was always small and he did not have a one-man exhibition until 1942. Today his paintings are hotly competed for but in his lifetime he sold only a few, and then very cheaply. He lived the life of a friendly hermit, his natural asceticism making poverty into a style.

In 1940, he left for New York City, where he would remain until his death. The new canvases that Mondrian began in New York are even more startling, and indicate the beginning of a new idiom that was cut short by the artist's death . Piet Mondrian died of pneumonia on February 1, 1944 and was interred in the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Mondrian painted this Composition in 1930 that fetched the historical price record for an abstract picture of £ 1.5 million in 1983 (2.3 million dollars). It was bought by the powerful Japanese art dealer Shigeki Kameyama. In 1989 Kameyama bought Picasso's Au Lapin Agile on auction at Sotheby's for 40 millions dollars and De Kooning's Interchange for $20.68 million. Three years later he bought Andy Warhol's 1962 painting of images of Marilyn Monroe, which he sold later to the Cleveland Museum.

Since then a lot of riche Japanese collectors went bankrupt and have left the international Art market but still the prices of Art have continued their upwards movement.