Piet Mondrian Quotes

Everything is expressed through relationship. Colour can exist only through other colours, dimension through other dimensions, position through other positions that oppose them. That is why I regard relationship as the principal thing.

- Piet Mondrian

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

- Piet Mondrian

I think that the destructive element is too much neglected in art.

- Piet Mondrian

Dance, theatre, etc. as art, will disappear along with the dominating 'expression' of tragedy and harmony: the movement of life itself will become harmonious.

- Piet Mondrian

I began as a naturalistic painter. Very quickly I felt the urgent need for a more concise form of expression and an economy of means. I never stopped progressing toward abstraction.

- Piet Mondrian

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

- Piet Mondrian

Things are beautiful or ugly only in time and space. The new man's vision being liberated from these two factors, all is unified in one unique beauty.

- Piet Mondrian

The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in the relativity of time and space.

- Piet Mondrian

We must look not to the negative (the misery, the bestial in life), although we undergo it and sympathize with it, but rather to the burgeoning life around us, which is strengthened by the negative.

- Piet Mondrian

The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.

- Piet Mondrian

If the paying public demands naturalistic art, then an artist can use his skills to produce such pictures - but these are to be clearly distinguished from the artist's own art.

- Piet Mondrian

Reality only appears to us tragical because of the disequilibrium and confusion of its appearances.

- Piet Mondrian

The most advanced minds as well as the least advanced are obliged to use the same words. If we adopt new words, it will be even more difficult - if not impossible - to make ourselves understood. The new man must therefore express himself in conventional language.

- Piet Mondrian

Only conscious man can mirror the universal: he can consciously become one with the universal and so can consciously transcend the individual.

- Piet Mondrian

Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.

- Piet Mondrian

Many appreciate in my former work just what I did not want to express, but which was produced by an incapacity to express what I wanted to express - dynamic movement in equilibrium. But a continuous struggle for this statement brought me nearer. This is what I am attempting in 'Victory Boogie Woogie.'

- Piet Mondrian

The clarification of equilibrium through plastic art is of great importance for humanity. It reveals that although human life in time is doomed to disequilibrium, notwithstanding this, it is based on equilibrium. It demonstrates that equilibrium can become more and more living in us.

- Piet Mondrian

All that is base in the masses is temporary, no doubt serving only to prevent evolution (that of the elite, as well) from proceeding too quickly and thus not becoming 'reality.'

- Piet Mondrian

It has become progressively clearer that the plastic expression of true reality is attained through dynamic movement in equilibrium. Plastic art affirms that equilibrium can only be established through the balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions.

- Piet Mondrian

Subjectivity ceases to exist only when the mutation-like leap is made from subjectivity to objectivity, from individual existence to universal existence.

- Piet Mondrian

All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.

- Piet Mondrian

Intuition enlightens and so links up with pure thought. They together become an intelligence which is not simply of the brain, which does not calculate, but feels and thinks.

- Piet Mondrian

Through the very culture of representation through form, we have come to see that the abstract - like the mathematical - is actually expressed in and through all things, although not determinately.

- Piet Mondrian

The natural does not have to be a specific representation. I am now working on a thing which is a reconstruction of a starry sky, yet I make it, nevertheless, without a given in nature.

- Piet Mondrian

I do not know how I shall develop, but for the present, I am continuing to work within ordinary, generally known terrain, different only because of a deep substratum, which leads those who are receptive to sense the finer regions.

- Piet Mondrian

As tradition, the female element clings to the old art and opposes anything new - precisely because each new art moves further away from the natural appearance of things.

- Piet Mondrian

Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.

- Piet Mondrian

Whoever says he is starting from a given in nature may be right, and so is he who says he is starting from nothing!

- Piet Mondrian

True Boogie-Woogie I conceive as homogeneous in intention with mine in painting: destruction of melody, which is the equivalent of destruction of natural appearance, and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means - dynamic rhythm.

- Piet Mondrian

The artist sees the tragic to such a degree that he is compelled to express the non-tragic.

- Piet Mondrian

The subjectivization of the universal in art brings the universal downward on one hand, while on the other it helps raise the individual toward the universal.

- Piet Mondrian

I came to the destruction of volume by the use of the plane. This I accomplished by means of lines cutting the planes. But still, the plane remained too intact. So I came to making only lines and brought the colour within the lines. Now the only problem was to destroy these lines also through mutual oppositions.

- Piet Mondrian

If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty.

- Piet Mondrian

I want to abolish time, especially in the contemplation of architecture.

- Piet Mondrian

Let us note that art - even on an abstract level - has never been confined to 'idea'; art has always been the 'realized' expression of equilibrium.

- Piet Mondrian

To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting.

- Piet Mondrian

The desire for freedom and equilibrium (harmony) is inherent in man (due to the universal in him).

- Piet Mondrian

By turning from the surface, one comes closer to the inner laws of matter, which are also the laws of the Spirit.

- Piet Mondrian

I am only satisfied insofar as I feel 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' is a definite progress, but even about this picture I am not quite satisfied. There is still too much of the old in it.

- Piet Mondrian

The position of the artist if humble. He is essentially a channel.

- Piet Mondrian

One can rightly speak of an evolution in plastic art. It is of the greatest importance to note this fact, for it reveals the true way of art - the only path along which we can advance.

- Piet Mondrian

The positive and negative states of being bring about action. They cause the loss of balance and of happiness. They cause the eternal revolutions - the changes that follow one upon the other. They explain why happiness cannot be achieved in time.

- Piet Mondrian

It is not important to make many pictures but that I have one picture right.

- Piet Mondrian

The spiritual (i.e. the supersensory) has many degrees; thus, the term 'spiritual' is used both for the scale of degrees away from the physical towards the spirit, but also only for the spiritual proper.

- Piet Mondrian

Art is the path to being spiritual.

- Piet Mondrian