New Additions
Since the publication of Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné by Joop Joosten and Robert Welsh in 1998, research into Mondrian has not come to a standstill. That book is still the standard work on Piet Mondrian’s oeuvre. The research for this catalogue ended in 1994. The 1994-98 period was used to prepare the collected research material for publication, but in fact it charts Mondrian’s oeuvre until 1994.
Since then, however, various works by the artist have been discovered or rediscovered. In many cases, Welsh (until his death in 2000) and Joosten were still consulted as experts after 1994 to verify the authenticity of these discoveries. In a number of cases, the findings that they made from 1994 onwards are recorded in publications that appeared after that date. Their research archives contain information about new attributions (and in some cases also about attributions in the Catalogue Raisonné which were later rightly rejected). All these attributions appear in this digital Catalogue Raisonné. The acquisition of Robert Welsh’s archives in 2007 and Joop Joosten’s in 2012 helped make it possible to include the scholarly data from after 1994 in the digital oeuvre catalogue.
Over the years there have been other Mondrian experts, aside from Welsh and Joosten, who have attributed works to the artist. These attributions appear in the catalogue with a note of who made the attribution and the year it was made. The new discoveries are presented here in a separate chapter: Additions. The system used for the numbering of these works was devised by Joop Joosten and used by him in his archives. It entails allotting a number to a new attribution corresponding to the number of the work that is most closely related to this attribution. A lowercase ‘a’ is added to this number to indicate that it is an attribution made after 1994. For example, in 2010 a new diamond-shaped composition of 1919 was discovered in the RKD documentation. This work most closely corresponds to the painting listed in the Catalogue Raisonné as B99 and is numbered B99a in the digital Catalogue Raisonné.
Cover image
Piet Mondriaan
Composition with grid 5a: lozenge composition with colors, dated 1919
Whereabouts unknown