April 28 through July 22, 2001
Busch-Reisinger Museum (more about the Busch-Reisinger)

Fleeing the Nazis, the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian sailed from London to New York in 1940. The energy of Manhattan galvanized the seventy-year-old artist, and in just over three years he changed the course of his own art and the history of modern painting.

The transatlantic paintings are the strangest chapter in Mondrian’s New York story. To make them, he took seventeen paintings that he had started (and in some cases finished) between 1935 and 1940 and literally tore into them, scraping away old paint to make room for new. He also took the extraordinary step of inscribing each painting with two dates.

These vigorously revised, internally riven paintings upset our image of Mondrian as an artist of pristine surfaces and perfect equilibrium. They also challenge us to be detectives—to sort out what Mondrian changed, when, and why.

The exhibition assembles this fascinating series for the first time ever and presents the results of three years of laboratory research on the individual paintings. Using computer kiosks in the study gallery, visitors can take a virtual tour beneath the complex surfaces of Mondrian’s paintings, then return to the exhibition gallery to study the works firsthand.

Still more research and interpretation is available on the web at a special site www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/mondrian and in the exhibition catalogue by co-curators Harry Cooper and Ron Spronk, published by Yale University Press.

Press Release

The show will travel:

Busch Resinger Museum, Harvard University
Cambridge Massachusetts
April 28 through July 22, 2001

Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas, Texas
August 19 through November 25, 2001