Entrée Chez Mondrian, André Kertesz’s most recognizable photograph and one of the most reproduced images of the 20th century, conveys an ethereal light which carries a sense of painter Piet Mondrian’s spiritual essence of the. With this image, taken shortly after the Hungarian photographer’s arrival in Paris, he captures the simple arrangement of geometric elements that made up Mondrian’s meticulously edited environment while simultaneously establishing with its clever composition the very nature of Kertesz’s own mature work.

Michel Seuphor, Mondrian’s close friend and biographer who introduced the two artists to each others, later described the same scene Kertesz expertly captured:‘’so strongly did [Mondrian] feel the lack of a woman in his daily life that he always kept a flower - an artificial flower suggesting a feminine presence in the round vase standing on the hall table of his studio at the Rue du Depart [...] The artificial leaves which went with it were painted white by Mondrian to banish entirely from his studio any recollection of the green he found so intolerable.”

Mondrian’s entrance strikes by its neatness and organised horizontal and vertical rectangles of light, essential components of his works, contrasting with the supple and diagonal lines of the staircase. Sarah Greenough described the composition of the photograph as “the intersection between the painter’s carefully controlled interior environment and the often unruly exterior world.”

With its spatial play of horizontal, vertical and diagonal planes; shadow and light; not to mention the subtle elements of personal biography, Entrée Chez Mondrian serves as an exceptional dialogue between two talented artists of the 20th century.

This print was gifted by André Kertesz to renowned curator and then Museum of Modern Art’s director James Johnson Sweeney in 1942. Kertesz and his wife Elizabeth moved to New York in 1936 and the photographer was included in two group exhibitions at the Modern Museum of Art in 1937 and 1942.

[1] Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian,: Life and Work, Paris, 1956, pp.86
[2] Michel Seuphor, Piet Mondrian,: Life and Work, Paris, 1956, pp.66