Brettell Lecture: The Mondrian Brand

Art historian Dr. Nancy Troy examines how Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s signature style of abstract art was made newly visible to broader and more diverse audiences than ever before after it was appropriated by couturier Yves Saint Laurent as the basis for his Mondrian Look of 1965. Troy asks how the posthumous exhibition, circulation, publication, and appropriation of Mondrian’s paintings allowed them to take on new meanings—both for Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann and for popular audiences—more than twenty years after the artist’s death in New York in 1944.