Piet Mondrian in the USA

Book excerpt: This exceptional book on Mondrian's work concentrates on the artist's American period. By birth a Dutchman, Piet Mondrian arrived in New York in September 1940. He died there four years later. A pioneer of abstract art, he was -- like Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich -- one of those Western painters remarkable as much for the work he produced as for his writings on the theory of art. Mondrian's celebrity was affirmed immediately after his death, when the first retrospective exhibition of his works given by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1945 afforded him both global recognition and a place in history. In this book, containing more than 400 reproductions, Mondrian's oeuvre finds new life and a new opportunity, as befits a master whom some would call the artist of his century. Virginia Pitts Rembert, through the skill of being able to pass on her own research and expertise, reveals Mondrian's secret strengths both as an artist and as an innovator.