From a damp hut in the Netherlands to a quiet haven in Paris,the powerful painter’s many studios were laboratories for his artistic ideas“It breathes your ideas”, Mondrian once said of the artist’s studio, or with his own very much in mind. Visits to these private dens,which can range from the creatively cluttered to the bleakly austere, are always instructive. The popularity of Open Studios” attests to the excitement experienced by non-artists at being allowed inside. Very few are ever preserved. Scant hint of a studio can be found in Hogarth’s summer retreat at Chiswick or Gainsborough’s house in Sudbury. Lord Leighton’s studio, or in his Holland Park house,has lost out to the commercial need to let out rooms for functions. More authentic is Sir Alfred Munnings’s studio in the garden of his house at Dedham, in Essex, and still better is the studio at Charleston,the Bloomsbury house in Sussex. Here, though the artists own long since gone, and ephemera is still pinned to the mantelpiece and the atmosphere of concentrated endeavour remains.
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) is said to own occupied approximately 14 studios in the course of his career. Most of these were also his home,his limited financial resources making it essential to live and work in the same situation. He had arrived in Amsterdam from a drowsy provincial town in 1892, to study at the Rijksakademie, and over the next 19 years he worked at 10 different addresses,often over cafes and in attics.
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Source: theguardian.com