Donation of a special Mondrian catalogue to the RKD
Last May, the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History received a special donation of two copies of the catalogue for the exhibition Artists in Exile, which took place at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1942. The catalogue had not yet been included in the RKD's collection. What makes this donation even more special is that one copy is signed by all the participating artists, who also posed for a photo in the catalogue. The catalogues were donated to the RKD by the Van Reekum-Van Moorselaar Foundation, which has been involved in Mondrian acquisitions in the past.
The exhibition Artists in Exile was on display in March 1942 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Gallery owner Pierre Matisse – son of the famous painter Henri – approached artists he knew from the European avant-garde who had fled Europe for the United States because of the Second World War. He called the participants in the exhibition “the most exciting group I have ever brought together.” The event can be seen as characteristic of the leading role in the arts that America took over from Europe as a result of the Second World War. Matisse's foresight of this shift can be seen in a letter in which he pointed out the exhibition to the important American collector Duncan Philips: “it will show the tremendous asset their [= the artists in exile] presence and their activity will have to the development of art in this country.”
Mondrian had been living in New York since early October 1940, where he arrived after a ten-day boat trip from Liverpool. He had left Paris in September 1938 and spent two years in London, where the war eventually caught up with him. In New York, Mondrian was regarded as an important European cultural figure and renewed his friendship with various artists he had known in Paris. His participation in the exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery is evidence of this. In the photograph of the participating artists in the catalogue, we see Mondrian in the company of, among others, André Breton, Fernand Léger and Max Ernst. The photo was taken in the studio of photographer Georges Platt Lynes in the run-up to the exhibition: ‘The photograph of the Artists in Exile in the show’s catalogue unites the most diverse factors in the European artistic scene (and represents, incidentally, a diplomatic triumph for Pierre Matisse who posed the subjects at George Platt Lynes’ studio one agitated morning).’1 The entire series consisted of at least fourteen photographs, only one of which is included in the catalogue. The book Mondriaan en fotografie, published by the RKD in 2023, contains a total of eleven photographs from the series.
The catalogue is an example of the importance attached to Mondrian’s work in New York and testifies to his growing status as an artist. RKD curator Wietse Coppes: ‘A signed copy of this catalogue has been high on my wish list for some time. The fact that the RKD now has two copies is a huge enrichment for the collection, especially when you consider that only a limited number of signed copies have been preserved. The exhibition Artists in Exile is one of the turning points in 20th-century art history. The fact that Mondrian was part of it must have given him a tremendous moral boost.’
The catalogues will be on display in the autumn of 2026 in the exhibition on Mondrian and boogie woogie music, which the RKD is currently working on with the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.
1. Coppes, Wietse, Leo Jansen, and Clarissa Frascadore. Mondrian and Photography: Picturing the Artist and His Work. Edited by Dorine Duyster. Ghent / The Hague: Tijdsbeeld; RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, 2023, p. 339, cat. no. 222.