Well, the idea is that you’d go to both. The organisers have avoided repetition across the two shows, ensuring that each examine a distinct aspect of the Dutchman’s art. The Tate show, ‘Mondrian and his Studios’, studies the significance of the atelier in the development of his highly influential, highly pared-down painting style, and – in sheer number of works – represents the most comprehensive show of Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism, the label he and other members of the De Stijl movement gave to their mode of non-representational art. In contrast, Turner Contemporary presents the first ever focus on the way Mondrian experimented with colour, with an emphasis on his earlier work.

The Liverpool show has one major draw that makes it a must for anyone interested in Mondrian: an exact reconstruction of the painter’s 1920s Paris studio. Wonderfully, you can walk inside. What one discovers is that, rather than just confining his yellow, red, blue and black squares to his canvases, Mondrian spread them out across the room, a garret rather small by today’s standards of famous artist’s studios. Mondrian wrote to British artist Winifred Nicholson that ‘the studio is also part of my painting’, and these coloured shapes – paper card instead of paint – are carefully pasted on walls so that they create visual tensions with the other quadrilaterals in the room, such as the frame of a window or door, or the artist’s easels....Continue Reading

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