Piet Mondrian, Apple Tree in Flower (1912) ©  Piet Mondriaan: 2009 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o hcr International, Warrenton, Virginia

Towards the end of 1911, Piet Mondrian—or as he then spelled it, “Mondriaan,” in the Dutch way—showed six paintings at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the first exhibition of a recently formed progressive artists’ association, the Moderne Kunst Kring. He also helped to judge submissions to the show, as a member of the group and as an artist with a growing reputation for adventurous work, at least by the standards of a conservative Netherlands. (Only a few years earlier, a young Dutch Rome Prize– winner lost his stipend when his work began to show Fauvist influence.)

In some ways, the Moderne Kunst Kring exhibition was a miniature equivalent of the New York Armory Show, although the Amsterdam public had been exposed much earlier to some of the Post-Impressionist works that galvanized young American artists in 1913. In 1905, the Stedelijk had held a large Vincent van Gogh retrospective and, in 1909, the Rijksmuseum hung a loan exhibition of seven van Goghs and twelve Paul Cézannes, the latter from the celebrated collection of Cornelis Hoogendijk. The twenty-eight Cézannes that dominated the 1911 Moderne Kunst Kring show, all lent by Hoogendijk, were no surprise, but the exhibition’s Pablo Picassos, Georges Braques, André Derains, Raoul Dufys, and Henri Le Fauconniers essentially introduced vanguard French painting to the Dutch public: The Picassos