Drs. Wietse Coppes

Curriculum vitae and duties

Art historian Wietse Coppes graduated in 2004 from the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University) on the subject Some aspects of the neoplastic work of Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Georges Vantongerloo and Marlow Moss.

Coppes started working for the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History in early 2005, where he worked as curator of The Style archives and in this role was responsible for the digitisation of the Theo and Nelly van Doesburg archives and for the acquisition of the archives on Robert P. Welsh (2007), Piet Mondrian (2012), Joop M. Joosten (2015) and Cis & Leo Heijdenrijk (2016). In recent years the RKD’s Mondrian & De Stijl collection has become one of the world’s foremost collections in its field.

He published articles on Mondrian in various catalogues, including that of the exhibition Mondrian (Centre Pompidou, Paris 2010), Alexander Calder. The huge discovery (Gemeentemuseum The Hague 2011), Les Chefs d'une Passion / Keys to a Passion (Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris 2015) and Mondrian Figuratif (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris 2019).

Coppes is the scholarly editor responsible for the digital Piet Mondrian: catalogue raisonné. He is also project leader and editor for the Mondrian Edition Project, launched in 2014. This ambitious long-term programme is a collaboration between the RKD and the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Huygens ING) and will in due course publish the entire correspondence and theoretical writings of Piet Mondrian. The website www.mondrianpapers.org is continually updated to show how the project is progressing.

Publications (selection)

• 'Photographies, reproductions et portraits: l'image que Mondrian veut donner de lui-même', in: tent.cat. Mondrian, Parijs (Centre Pompidou), 2010
• 'Het "technisch-wetenschappelijke laboratorium" van Piet Mondriaan. Het atelier op 26, rue du Depart ten tijde van het bezoek van Alexander Calder', in: tent.cat. Alexander Calder. De grote ontdekking, Den Haag (Gemeentemuseum Den Haag), 2011
• 'Piet Mondriaan in zijn atelier, ca. 1909', in: tent.cat. Portret in portret in de Nederlandse Kunst 1550-2012, Dordrecht (Dordrechts Museum), 2012
• 'Le naturel dans son apparance la plus profonde. L'évolution de Mondrian vers la vraie vision de la réalité', in: tent.cat. Les Clefs d'une Passion, Parijs (Fondation Louis Vuitton), 2015
• '"I'm the same, just a bit more balanced, if I don't deceive myself." A biographical sketch of Piet Mondrian in the period 1909-1912, based on the letters sent to Aletta de Iongh', in: tent.cat. Character is Fate, Rotterdam (Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art), 2015