Paintings by Piet Mondrian will be leaving the Netherlands one by one over the next few months. But they will not be gone for long.

The Centre Pompidou Museum of Modern Art in Paris is organising a large exhibition on the Dutch artist and the art movement De Stijl (wikipedia). Around 100 Mondrian paintings will be on displau there, in a total of 22 rooms.

Huge cooperation
”We have been working on this exhibition for four years and have visited the Netherlands at least ten times,” says Frédéric Migayrou, deputy manager of the Centre Pompidou and exhibition organiser. “We visited archives and museums and got a lot of cooperation from everyone.”

It is not yet certain what the complete 'line up' will be for the exhibition, but a large number of paintings have been promised. One of the main donors is The Hague’s Municipal Museum (Gemeentemuseum), which has the world’s largest collection of Mondrians. A whole series of paintings will travel from The Hague to Paris, including the famous Composition with Colour Planes no. 3 (1917) and Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue and Black (1921). 

Composition with Yellow and Blue
Other museums have also donated Mondrian paintings from their collections. Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam has made Composition with Yellow and Blue (1929) available, the Stedelijk Musuem in Amsterdam is sending Tableau III, Oval Composition (1913). 

The Kröller Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven are also lending paintings.

”It’s exceptional for the Kröller Müller to lend its paintings. And The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum has helped us enormously with our research,” says Mr Migayrou enthusiastically. 

Two catalogues
The paintings for the retrospective exhibition are not coming from the Netherlands alone, but from all corners of the world. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Tate Gallery in London are also donating works by Mondrian.

The exhibition Mondrian/De Stijl (item in French on Centre Pompidou website) will open in December. The National Museum for Modern Art, Centre Pompidou is even publishing two 300-page catalogues for the event.

The part of the exhibition about Mondrian will focus on his period in Paris (1912-1914 and 1919-1938). In addition, his old Parisian studio will be reconstructed in the museum. 

High time
De Stijl became a well known phenomenon in the art world at the beginning of the 20th century for its abstract art with asymmetrical lines and brightly coloured blocks – as in Mondrian’s paintings. The Centre Pompidou also has drawings made by Dutch architect J.J.P. Oud for Café de Unie in Rotterdam and Gerrit Rietveld’s famous wooden chairs.

”De Stijl with its Dutch origins influenced the whole Avant Garde movement of the 20th century. But it has been almost 100 years since a large exhibition on the movement was held in France,” says Mr Migayrou. “It is high time for another one.”

[lead image: Piet Mondrian. Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue and Black / Compositie met rood, geel, blaw en swart. 1921. Oil on canvas. 59.5 x 59.5 cm. Gemeentemuseum, the Hague, Netherlands]