Curated by Antonia Hoerschelmann
Dealing the latest blow to the old idealist account of Mondrian’s abstraction, this retrospective of some one hundred paintings and rarely exhibited large-format drawings (all made between 1898 and 1943) foregrounds the mutual imbrication of the two media in the artist’s spectacular oeuvre. This issue has been tackled before, most provocatively in a 1994 retrospective cocurated by veteran Mondrian specialist Joop Joosten (author of the present show’s catalogue) that devoted a whole section to an elucidation of Mondrian’s working process after 1920. What’s new at the Albertina—apart from being the first time Vienna will see Mondrian en masse—is a detailed consideration of drawing’s fundamental role in the painter’s passage to abstraction in the 1910s.
