Piet Mondriaan: Cherished posessions shed light on very private man

Much of the documentation on Dutch artist Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944) has already found its way to the RKD art historical archives in The Hague. Recently a unique collection of Mondriaan letters , photographs and artefacts was purchased in the United States which further completes the picture of a very private man, writes Nrc.

The collection acquired by the RKD is valuable, writes the paper, because it consists of cherished possessions, things that Mondriaan took with him when he left the Netherlands for Paris in 1911. From there he went to London and finally, at the outbreak of war, to New York.
Horoscopes
Head curator at the RKD, Anita Hopmans, came across the collection when she went to New York to do research. The archive, one of the few that was still in private hands, belonged to Rhonda Shearer who had bought it in 2004 from the heirs of Harry Holtzman who originally inherited the collection from his friend Mondriaan. A leaky pipe in Shearer’s home precipitated the move of the collection to a safer place.
Among the things Mondriaan left to Holtzman were portraits of his parents, letters, an address books, 49 photographs and, revealingly, two horoscopes. Mondriaan wanted to know whether his decision to leave the Netherlands was the right one and consulted an astrologer. ‘You will at one point in your life study the occult and mysticism‘ one prediction read. Later, the decision to leave London for New York would prove equally difficult but that time a bomb exploding near his house made up his mind for him.
Private
The collection tells us much about the man, Hopmans tells the paper. ‘Mondriaan was an intensely private man. This collection makes him more human. It tells us he was in two minds about coming to New York, how he lived, that he had a modern outlook on life. The horoscopes show he believed life would take its natural course and his vegetarian recipe book tells us he was careful about what he ate. His health wasn’t good. For Mondriaan a balanced diet fitted in with his belief in a new society.’
Two photographs in the collection show the artistic development of the creator of such famous abstract modern works as Victory Boogie Woogie. Both show the artist striking a pose – he is studiously looking at a book – in an old fashioned studio. But in the 1906 photograph a corner of modern looking frame can just be seen and two years later, the studio wall shows a sketch for his The red tree, one of the paintings that marks Mondriaan’s journey from a figurative to an abstract painter.
The RKD now owns a considerable number of letters from Mondriaan to collectors and fellow painters and is contemplating the publication of a book.