Artistic exploration: Mondrian's New York City, 1942

An artistically vibrant city, New York was, for Mondrian, the symbol of the modern world and its renewal. The Centre Pompidou and Namaki invite you to decipher the work New York City from Mondrian. Are you ready to follow the lines of a world in three colors?

Born in Holland on March 7, 1872, Piet Mondrian left at the age of twenty to study painting at the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts. He began by creating realistic landscapes. Before long, his tree trunks were transformed into simple vertical lines and the branches into horizontal lines. Interested in new artistic trends, including cubism, he moved to Paris in 1912, where he discovered Cézanne, Braque and Picasso. Later, as the Second World War approached, he moved to London, eventually settling in New York.

Mondrian painted abstract pictures and even went beyond the experience of abstraction, contenting himself with placing vertical and horizontal lines side by side without any reference to reality. Soon, colors were limited to the three fundamentals: red, yellow and blue. Shapes were limited to squares and rectangles. The artist uses strips of paper of varying widths, which he lays out on his canvas to visualize the tangle of lines.

Unlike the Parisian streets and architecture Mondrian had known, New York was a new city with parallel and perpendicular streets, and slender, aligned buildings. He began to paint his surroundings and the city's hectic atmosphere in an abstract way.

After painting compositions combining black lines and colored geometric shapes, Mondrian eventually excluded black from his canvases. The painting New York City1942, painted in the last years of his life, belongs to this new creative impetus. He used only the three primary colors: red, blue and yellow. The colored lines intertwine to evoke street patterns, the verticality of skyscrapers, but also all the movement of life and joy of life that Mondrian felt.

Doing math while looking at an artist’s canvas is more fun, isn’t it? Have fun counting the red lines or yellow boxes for example. Depending on your age, you can also count the horizontal lines, the number of crossings or squares that the perpendicular lines have created. What can you also count?

With the Face painting pencils from Namakiyou can turn your body into a huge canvas for painting. Practice drawing lines to connect two points. If you want to complete your work, you can fill in the squares to draw geometrical figures like Mondrian did.

The face painting pencils are easy to apply and remove. You can trace endlessly!

How about becoming a line between lines? You can use laces, belts, bits of fabric or scarves of different colors to create lines on the floor. Imagine yourself as an architect, using these lines to build streets and skyscrapers. Then have fun jumping from one street to another, becoming a bridge or climbing building facades.

Have you ever heard of copyists? These are artists authorized to legally reproduce the canvases of great painters with such precision that the two canvases could be mistaken for one another. There can also be forgers, who do this illegally and very roughly. Would you like to play copyist? Put yourself in Mondrian's shoes and create your own replica using recycled materials (sheets of paper, cardboard, scraps of fabric or carpet...).

Congratulations, you've just explored the corridors of Mondrian's imagination! To complete your reading, you can :

• Browse the book dedicated to the work in the "L'art en Jeu" collection, Centre Pompidou Edition.
• Discover the painting New York City, 1942 and many other works by the artist at the Centre Pompidou.