Seeing the light with Piet Mondrian and Hilma Af Klint
Long Reads
In the basement depot of the impressive Art Deco Kunstmuseum in The Hague, the Netherlands, there are racks upon racks of artworks. The stores and archives of galleries and museums are extraordinary places, the gritty engine rooms of the polished, minimal spaces we usually associate with seeing art. Here, among the empty frames and the metal grids used to store hundreds of paintings cheek by jowl, there is something quite thrilling about coming face to face with a painting like Piet Mondrian’s Red Amaryllis with Blue Background, painted in 1907 as one in a series of single flower portraits (around 200 of them still exist) he was to make over his lifetime.