Exina’s Reviews > Mondrian > Status Update

Picasso's return to figurative painting disappointed Mondrian.

Doesburg designed a stained glass window in 1917. Mondrian admired the motif and adopted it for his new paintings.

Mondrian and van Doesburg agreed that the new painting had to be combined with an equally radically modern architecture. Simple white building elements and a combination of pure colours should replace the sad and overcrowded "brownish" 19th century world.

The openness of the abstract grid of lines is offering the widest range of interpretative possibilities.

There was obviously a point when the significance of his achievements became clear to him. He painted pictures that did not copy nature, yet they were as inaccessible and elusive, as empty and majestic as a field, the sea or the starry sky.