+ Expand

Description: Ditch near Landzicht farm signed 'Piet Mondriaan 1900' (lower right), and signed again (lower left) watercolour on paper 45 x 64 cm. PROVENANCE A gift from the artist to Dr. I.A. van der Wijk in 1901 for his marriage, thence by descent. LITERATURE R.P. Welsh, Piet Mondrian, Catalogue Raisonn‚ of the Naturalistic Works (until early 1911), Blaricum 1998, p. 42 (ill. in colour) and p. 242, no A216 (ill.) NOTES Piet Mondrian is one of the most recognisable artists of the twentieth century and his reputation as a pioneer of abstraction is undisputed. His first famous Neo Plastic paintings, also called 'grid paintings', date from the early 1920's. He was almost fifty years old at the time. Their impact was immense, not only on the art-world, but also on the collective visual vocabulary of the past century. To find this iconic, fully abstract style, Mondrian followed a path of numerous influences, like those of the Hague School, forms of post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Expressionism and finally Cubism. Always in his very personal handwriting though, never copying blindly. The actual location of the present watercolour "Ditch near Landzicht farm" has no bearing what so ever upon its significance. Although the late Professor Robert P. Welsh, author of the oeuvre catalogue of Mondrian's early works, stuck to the artist's theories by titling this work "Irrigation ditch with young pollarded willow"(number A 216 in his catalogue), more recent studies have pointed out that it depicts a ditch near Landzicht farm.(H. Jansen and J.Joosten, '1900-1904' in: exh. catalogue Mondrian, The path to abstraction, Zwolle 2002, p. 68-91), Landzicht farm was located in the centre of the Gein area, near Abcoude just outside Amsterdam, a favourite place to sojourn for Amsterdam residents. Mondrian frequented this area as well, usually on his bicycle, and the farm was a starting point of many of his works in his oeuvre. This striking watercolour, in private hands since 1901, is a typical example of Mondrians artistic ideas of around 1900, the rediscovery of the mythical landscape, following the tradition of the painters of the Hague School, who on their turn reverted to seventeenth century Dutch landscape painting. In short, a representation of a landscape in oil or watercolour should in their eyes be a form of expression of the universal and the Divine, and should thus transcend the mundane and particular. Or, as Janssen and Joosten state: "The Dutch saw nature as a 'second book'- coming immediately after the 'first divine book', the Bible- in which there were many lessons to be learned about simplicity, truth, the course of events and Divine Will. An important part of Dutch landscape tradition (...) is understandable only from this point of view". (p. 69-70) Like so many of his contemporaries, Mondrian balanced on the thin line between lifelike portrayal and symbolic meaning. During these same years he came into contact with the range of thoughts of Theosophy, which resulted in a membership of the Theosophical Society. The introduction to its hyper-idealistic theories naturally effected his workings. Representing reality actually meant representing a higher order that lies behind the reality we are able to perceive. In that sense, "Ditch near Landzicht farm" can be seen as an example of a form of expressing reality Mondrian strove for all his life. As said, hardly any of Mondrian's earlier landscape pictures bare titles referring to topographical identifications. It is therefor fair to conclude that he was strongly motivated by pictorial possibilities of the world surrounding him. In no respect is this principle more applicable than to a group of landscape settings in the environs of Amsterdam, from the period 1897-1901, also including the present watercolour. Only recent research has made it possible to identify some of these untitled landscapes. How should we consider them, what is their meaning? One should probably just take them as Mondrian did himself: randomly selected landscape subjects treated with greater or lesser artistic success according to the pictorial possibilities each seem to present, but, again, also as representations of the universal and the Divine. From the beginning of is career onwards, Mondrian has one strong habit: he is inclined to work in series. "Ditch near Landzicht farm" also seems to be part of a series of sketches and plein air studies of the same subject. Moreover, Welsh considers our watercolour to be a final version, a conclusion. It is characterised by a willow, running vertically from the top edge to the foreground of the picture, with a very high horizon, closing of the view of the upper part of the painting, leaving scarcely any space for the canal. The beholder's attention consequently focuses on the interaction of the planes of the canal and the meadow. Here he truly composes planes with the aim of achieving the utmost expression. Piet Mondrian searched for a simplified structure of the visible reality, and found one: the horizon and the tree are treated as the expression of a horizontal/vertical structure. Everything in the watercolour tends towards this pattern Looking back on the period of the beginning of the twentieth century Mondrian once said: "After several years, my work unconsciously began to deviate more and more from the natural aspects of reality." Or, as he put it on another occasion: "We are here on the way upward, away from the matter".