In a move with distinctly 2021 energy, the estate of the abstract artist Piet Mondrian has collaborated with a web3 entertainment company to drop a batch of digital collectibles, on-chain tokens the world once called NFTs.
The company in question is Doodles, the outfit whose 10,000-strong lineup of mildly quirky pastel-colored avatars once ranked among the most coveted art assets on the blockchain. The collection’s high watermark came in early 2022, when a golden monkey with a crown (Doodle #6914) sold for the equivalent of $1.1 million.
Together, Mondrian’s estate and Doodles have remixed five of the artist’s works, selling them from June 3 on OpenSea, the largest online marketplace for digital collectibles.
The works, which span much of Mondrian’s career, are Composition with Grid 9: Checkerboard Composition with Light Colors (1919), Composition with Red, Black, Blue, and Yellow (1928), Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (1930), Composition No. 10 (1939–42), and his unfinished final painting Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–44).
Piet Mondrian x Doodles. Licensed by the Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo courtesy of Doodles.
As the collaborators proclaim in a press release: “The structure stays. The balance stays. Everything else is new.” In essence, this means swapping out the primary colors of Mondrian’s limited palette for mint green, baby blue, and bubblegum pink and dropping cartoon characters into his gridded compositions. An impassive white cat lounges across Composition with Red, Black, Blue, and Yellow and an amorphous mouth spews a rainbow of color across Checkerboard Composition with Light Colors, one of the earliest examples of Mondrian’s de Stijl style.
Collectors can acquire a so-called blind box featuring all five compositions as well as two limited-edition works, based on Mondrian’s 1928 and 1930 works, each of which come with a physical print. All buyers also receive a further digital collectible: a Doodle Dog or a Doodle Pencil, on VeVe, an app for collecting and trading digital artwork.
Piet Mondrian x Doodles. Licensed by the Mondrian/Holtzman Trust. Photo courtesy of Doodles.
Since its launch by Canadian illustrator Scott Martin (a.k.a. Burnt Toast) in 2021, Doodles has followed the digital winds, pushing its IP in whatever direction they’ve been blowing. First, it released products suitable for the metaverse, next it minted a native token on Solana, and most recently its created Doodles A.I., which offers itself as a world-building tool tied to the Doodles universe. On OpenSea, Doodles is down more than 95 percent from its peak in winter 2022 — from a floor of around $50,000 per digital collectible to under $1,000 today.
For its part, Mondrian’s Estate sees Doodles as offering access to a new generation.
“This is perfect for engaging younger adults and will surely be successful to the extent that Doodles are recognized in different sectors of the market, from music, gaming, and sports,” Madalena Holtzman, a trustee at the Mondrian/Holtzman Trust, said in a statement. “I am excited to see what becomes of this adventure with them.”
