MONDRIAAN 1872-1944  Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1955

This is a new experiment (Oct 2002) in my presentation of Mondrian information, an attempt to recreate the Mondrian exhibition held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1955. Taking the listing of works from the Catalogue Raisonné, the plan is to collect images of all the pictures exhibited and load them into a FrontPage auto gallery. If that works then, over time, I will gradually reconstruct all the larger exhibitions, say, all those with ten or more Mondrians.

On 20th November 2002 I visited the gallery and with the kind help of the archivist, Janeen Haythornwaite, went through the records of the exhibition. Regrettably there are no installation photographs showing the layout of the exhibition, but there is a lot of interesting background information which I will gradually sift through. The only remaining poster, shown right, is not in mint condition. I have 18 pages of press clippings, some interesting correspondence from Ben Nicholson I will try to decipher and evidence that there is an error in the Catalogue Raisonné on the listing of pictures exhibited.

Sadly, Bryan Robertson, the gallery's director at the time of the Mondrian show and the decades following had just died. He did a great deal to revitalise the Whitechapel after the war and his passing had clearly affected the gallery staff.

The table at the bottom of the page gives the catalogue details.

This is a fantastic selection of works. It will take a while to assemble colour versions of all of those and I may have to make do with the B&W versions in the catalogue for some. At first I tried to keep the sizes of the images in proportion to the originals but have now switched to a standard height for all as a compromise between viewing convenience and detail available.

Apologies for the delay in assembling and presenting the pictures. This is taking longer than I had hoped and the FrontPage gallery is not a particularly sophisticated tool.

1: A142

2: A208

3: A290

4: A660

5: A471

6: A366

7: A332

8: A138

9: C64

11: A499

12: A593

13: A687

14: A654

15: A693

18: A672

19: A671

21: B4

22: B19

23: A707

24: A709

26: B16

28: B6

30: B2

31: B18

22: B37

37: B85

38: B89

39: B103

40: B97

41: B99

AA: B73

47: B261

49: B277

51: B265

53: B275

54: B279

55: B301

The River Gein: Trees at Moonrise, 1902

canvas 79x92.5 cm

Private Collection: Holland

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1: A142

 

 

List of works exhibited from the Catalogue Raisonné, vol 2, appendix 2 page 53.

The first number is the exhibition catalogue entry and the second entry the reference in the Catalogue Raisonné. For example, 3:A290 is the third work in the exhibition catalogue (The River Gein: Trees at Water's Edge c. 1902) and is A290 in the Catalogue Raisonné (Row of Eight Young Willows Reflected in the Water c. 1905).
The descriptions with the images are taken from the exhibition catalogue

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