RKD STUDIES

This RKD Study on Piet Mondrian is based on Piet Mondrian: catalogue raisonné by Robert P. Welsh and Joop M. Joosten, from 1998.¹ The RKD Study contains a listing of all of the works, in the order of the catalogue numbers assigned to them by Welsh and Joosten. The information published here is limited to the catalogue number, name of author, name of artwork, date and current whereabouts. By clicking on a work, one can access the corresponding record in the database RKDimages, which contains the full information about the work. The RKD tries to keep the records updated with the latest information, including recent images of the works.
This digital oeuvre catalogue was created as a part of the Mondrian Edition Project, whose objective is to provide a complete scholarly digital publication of all Piet Mondrian’s letters and theoretical writings. This project aims to publish a complete scholarly edition of all of the letters and theoretical writings by Piet Mondrian. The first part of the project, containing the letters and essays from 1892-June 1919, was published in 2024 and is available on ww.mondrianpapers.org.

Classification
In their catalogue from 1998 Welsh and Joosten assigned a catalogue number preceded by the letters A, B and C to all of the works by Mondrian. Volume I, that was compiled by Welsh, contains the early works by Mondrian, dating from 1888-1910. The volume includes more than 700 works, that have been assigned a number that is preceded by a capital ‘A’ (A1-A710). Joosten compiled Volume II of the catalogue raisonné, that contains 415 works of art, that are preceded by a capital ‘B’ (B1-B415). These are the cubist and abstract works, the sketchbooks and furniture, dating from 1911-1944. Lastly, there are the categories of the ‘Late Naturalistic Works’ and the ‘Copies’, that were also compiled by Joosten. The works in these categories are preceded by a capital ‘C’ (respectively C1-C153 and C154-155).

The presentation of the consecutive catalogue numbers has been retained for the digital oeuvre catalogue, but the precise classification is partly different from that made by Welsh and Joosten. As far as possible, Welsh classified Mondrian’s early oeuvre chronologically on the basis of the locations Mondrian painted, such as Winterswijk, Amsterdam and Twente, followed by a figure that refers to the number of times Mondrian returned to those places. In compiling the digital publication, it was necessary to restrict the number of illustrations shown on one page for the sake of clarity and readability. Most of the ‘chapters’ Welsh defined contained far more works of art than would have been possible in this digital edition. Therefore, Welsh’s chapters have been divided into smaller (sub)chapters, based on the subjects, like figures, portraits, still lifes, landscapes and townscapes, which recur throughout the first volume of the catalogue raisonné.²

Since Mondrian dated his later work, Joosten was able to create a strict chronological sequence for the B-numbers in Volume II. Joosten’s classification, presenting the paintings by year, has been retained in this digital catalogue wherever possible. In a few cases, however, some of the 33 separate chapters in this second volume have been combined. For the C-numbers, the sequence in the catalogue raisonné has also been retained, although it is often very hard to assign a date with certainty, specifically to the late naturalistic flower pieces. A sub division has been made here of the species of flower(s) that Mondrian drew and/or painted.

New Possibilities
Finding a specific work in Welsh and Joosten’s publication can be difficult for anyone who is not thoroughly familiar with Mondrian’s oeuvre and the order of the catalogue raisonné. If a work’s oeuvre catalogue number is known one only has to click on the relevant chapter, or enter the catalogue number in the search bar. Because all of Mondrian’s works have been entered in the RKDimages-database, there are various new ways of navigating through the almost 1,500 works.³ Thanks to the search facets in this database, it is possible to make selections, for example, by exhibition, sale, provenance or technique (painting, watercolour, drawing etc.). Collection catalogues can be easily created by selecting one institution: for example, all of the 318 works by Mondrian from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Search criteria can also be combined, for example a ‘drawing’ of a ‘mill’ from the period ‘1890-1900’. The more elaborate searches can only be conducted in RKDimages on the website http://research.rkd.nl. The search functionalities of the RKD Studies are limited.

RKDimages-records
Titles
In their publication Robert Welsh and Joop Joosten devised various systems for presenting information. One of them is related to the formatting of the titles of the artworks. In the 1998 catalogue raisonné the significance of the titles is indicated by capital letters, inverted commas or italics. Welsh and Joosten preferred the titles Mondrian gave to his works. When known, these titles are printed in capital letters in their oeuvre catalogue. Titles shown between inverted commas come from letters, quotes from other people and exhibitions which may or may not be traced back to the artist himself. Finally, the titles Welsh and Joosten devised themselves or took from others are shown in italics.

These typographic differentiations could not be maintained in this digital edition. Therefore, the primacy of Mondrian’s own titles is all that has been retained for input into RKDimages. They can be identified by the addition ‘authentiek’, or ‘authentic’ in the case of an English title, in brackets.⁴ Other titles are available in the RKDimages database, in order to identify the works.

Literature References
This digital edition does not include all of the information pertaining to an artwork that Welsh and Joosten presented in their catalogue raisonné. References to literature for example have been limited to the most relevant publications. This also applies to the observations made by both authors regarding the artwork, in which arguments for the determination of dates or exact locations are given. Because of the authors’s copyright only a reference to the catalogue raisonné from 1998 was provided. References to earlier oeuvre catalogues, specifically to Michel Seuphor’s Piet Mondrian: Life and Work (1956) and the revised second French edition (1970), Maria Grazia Ottolenghi’s L’Opera Completa di Mondrian (1974) and Piet Mondriaan. Een catalogus van zijn werk in Nederlands openbaar bezit by Cor Blok (1974), are available, because these publications are also important for understanding the history of the oeuvre of Mondrian.

Update of Exhibitions and Provenance Information
All information about exhibitions and the provenance of works has been included and/or updated, and in a number of cases exhibition references have been corrected. All sales information has been checked and sales from after the publication of the catalogue raisonné in 1998 have been added, as far as the information was available on platforms such as auction house databases, etc. The sources consulted are the archives of Robert Welsh and Joop Joosten, the website www.artnet.com and the websites of Christie’s, Sotheby’s and various other Dutch and international auction houses, art dealerships and museums.

Information from Other Sources
In some cases factual information from other sources has been included, if it differs from what is stated in Welsh/Joosten 1998. This may relate to provenances in sale catalogues published prior to 1994 and those seen and rejected by the authors. For completeness the provenance given by the auction house is included with a reference to the source. All the sales mentioned have been verified, which made it possible to add the prices and (if known) names of buyers, to the digital oeuvre catalogue.

New Attributions
After the publication of Welsh and Joosten’s oeuvre catalogue in 1998, several works by Mondrian resurfaced. These works are included in this digital catalogue, often for the first time. The section ‘New Additions’ include works attributed to Welsh/Joosten after 1998, but also by Hans Janssen (former curator of Kunstmuseum Den Haag) and Wietse Coppes (curator of the Mondrian & De Stijl-archives and documentation of the RKD). The ‘New Additions’ section is compiled by Coppes, who is also responsible for additions that may come up in the future. To submit works for evaluation, one is asked to fill out a request for ‘art historical research’ on the website www.rkd.nl/.

Information after 1994
Although Piet Mondrian: catalogue raisonné was published in 1998, the research Welsh and Joosten’s conducted for this publication already ended in 1994. Because there have been dozens of exhibitions and publications on works by Mondrian since then, it was decided to include a curated selection of this new information in the digital catalogue. This supplement is primarily intended as an initial step in reducing the backlog and storing this kind of information in a central and reliable place now and in the future.
It was not always possible to establish from an exhibition catalogue which works were actually shown. In these cases there is no exhibition reference, but only a reference to the literature. All the newly added literature and exhibition references have also been added to RKD Study bibliography.

Images
The aim was to include at least one colour illustration of each work of art in this digital oeuvre catalogue. When this proved impossible, a black and white reproduction is available. In a few cases no illustration could be found.

Adjustments, corrections and additions can be communicated by sending an email to info@rkd.nl.