Dutch modern art peaked with the achievements of Piet Mondrian who gave us so much to enjoy with primary colours set out in simple arrangements which is about as abstract as it gets. Mondrian wanted to depict scenes in a non-traditional style, even though he had the skills to paint in manner as seen in previous centuries.
His landscape paintings are still popular, such as with his tree depictions, but clearly he decided to follow a new path later on.
Boogie Woogie Broadway shows Mondrian as he ended his career, capturing a New York street scene from a bird's eye view. Ingeniously, he used small squares of yellow to depict taxis travelling along, seemingly as a congested procession. The full extent of the artist's career continues to be enjoyed, in a similar way to Wassily Kandinsky who also offered traditional and modern art stages in his career.
There is much to see here and his work truly serves as a story, offering an obvious path of experimentation and enlightenment as new ideas are tested and developed over time. Piet served a role of influence of future artists but he by no means worked alone. There was significant help from other quarters towards making new methods acceptable to academics as well as mainstream art fans.
Typically the former have been the harder to appease.
Whilst their developments took some time, their achievements remain acknowledged and even the most anti modern art fan would have to accept the influence shown by Piet Mondrian and other artists with related work at that time. History teaches us that new ideas always take time to bed in and the more extreme that they are, as compared to what had gone before, then the harder their challenge in gaining acceptance and exposure.
The abstraction of Mondrian was bold and original beyond belief, he maybe would have even doubted himself until other talented artists also joined in together to share their beliefs for where art should development in the coming years. He may never have realised that his work would still be appreciated and discussed in such detail in the present day, around a century after he produced his best work.
