Long before art schools offered professional practice courses, Mondrian was carefully honing his public persona and making shrewd decisions about the context in which his work was shown. An early manifestation of this was the deliberate staging of a 1905 photographic portrait, which shows the artist working in his Amsterdam studio. A hat hangs casually from the corner of an unfinished painting, set on an easel, while Mondrian sits in front of it—seemingly deep in thought. He’s dressed in a suit and holds a brush. As Deicher pointed out, “The photograph is no random snapshot.” The artist’s intention was two-fold, according to Deicher: “to present an image of Mondrian to the public and to reassure potential purchasers unsettled by modern experimentation as to his method of working.”

Later in his career, as he became more established, Mondrian’s on-camera persona transformed. He shed suits in favor of a more rough-and-tumble painter’s coat, and posed in front of unfinished paintings. These more informal portraits supported the painter’s bid to be seen as a “technician of the new,” Deicher noted. His studio was now presented as a laboratory.

This attention to detail extended to the way Mondrian exhibited his work. Throughout his career, he emphasized how important the right placement and lighting was to the experience of viewing his paintings. When the canvas Composition 1916 (1916) was exhibited at the Hollandsche Kunstenaarskring in 1916, Mondrian wrote to his friend and collector Salomon B. Slijper, “I have now hung that last piece…in a place that is less brightly lit, and it now strikes me once again as outstanding.” He also gave installation instructions to collectors. In a letter to Hilla Rebay on October 10, 1930, he explained, “I am very happy that my painting brings you peace. I advise you not to hang it too low, and to give it full light.”

These conditions were not only important to the presentation of Mondrian’s canvases, but also directly tied to the concepts that drove them. In 1917, during an exhibition of Mondrian’s work at the Stedelijk Museum , the painter wrote to Van Doesburg, “The light in the [museum] does seem to change the color values. In my (too small) studio, the effect was different.…I believe that my work should be made in the place where it is to hang, and in direct relation to that environment.”

The same year, in his seminal article “New Plastic in Painting,” Mondrian elaborated on the relationship between working environment and the success of a painting: “Although the New Plastic appears to have given up all technique, its technique has actually become so important that the colors must be painted in the precise place where the work is to be seen. Only then can the effect of the colors and the relationships be precise, for they are interdependent with the entire architecture; and the architecture in turn must harmonize completely with the work.”



