Mondrian Vm6n-dre-,an\, Piet orig. Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan
(b. March 7, 1872, Amersfoort, Neth.—d. Feb. 1, 1944, New York, N.Y., U.S.) Dutch painter. At the insistence of his father, headmaster of a Cal¬ vinist school, he obtained an education degree, but then immediately began taking painting lessons. His first paintings were exhibited in 1893;
his early work reflected the influence of avant-garde trends such as Post- Impressionism and Cubism. In 1917 Mondrian and three other painters founded the art periodical and the movement known as De Stijl. The group advocated a style called “neoplasticism,” which entailed complete rejec¬ tion of visually perceived reality as subject matter and the restriction of a pictorial language to its most basic elements of the straight line, pri¬ mary colours, and the neutrals of black, white, and gray. He painted in this style for the next 20 years, until he fled war-tom Paris for London and then New York City in 1940. Inspired by the city’s pulsating life and the new rhythms of musical forms such as jazz, he replaced his austere patterns with a series of small squares and rectangles that coalesced into a flow of colourful vertical and horizontal lines. His late masterpieces (e.g., Broadway Boogie-Woogie , 1942-43) express this new vivacity. The consistent development of Mondrian’s art toward complete abstraction was an outstanding feat in the history of modern art, and his work fore¬ shadowed the rise of abstract art in the 1940s and ’50s.
moneran See bacteria, prokaryote
Monet Vmo-'naV Claude (b. Nov. 14, 1840, Paris, France—d. Dec. 5, 1926, Givemy) French landscape painter. Monet spent his early years in Le Havre, where his first teacher, Eugene Boudin, taught him to paint in the open air. Moving to Paris, he formed lifelong friendships with other young painters, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Paul Cezanne. Beginning in the mid 1860s, Monet pursued a new style; rather than trying to reproduce faithfully the scene before him in detail, he recorded on the spot the impression that relaxed, momentary vision might receive. In 1874 he helped organize an independent exhibition, apart from the official Salon, of work he and his friends produced in this style. One of Monet’s works at the exhibition, Impression: Sunrise (1872), inspired the journalist Louis Leroy to give the group its name. Throughout the 1870s, Monet and the other Impressionists explored this style and exhib¬ ited together. By 1881 the original group had begun to disintegrate; only Monet continued with the same fervour to carry on the scrutiny of nature. In his mature works Monet developed his method of producing a series of several studies of the same motif (e.g., haystacks, 1891, and Rouen Cathedral, 1894), changing canvases as the light or his interest shifted. In 1893, in the garden at his home in Giverny, Monet created the water-lily pond that inspired his most famous works, the lyrical Nympheas (water- lilies) paintings. Wildly popular retrospective exhibitions of his work toured the world during the last decades of the 20th century and estab¬ lished his unparalleled public appeal, sustaining his reputation as one of the most significant and popular figures in the modern Western painting tradition.
monetarism School of economic thought that maintains that the money supply is the chief determinant of economic activity. Milton Friedman and his followers promoted monetarism as an alternative to Keynesian eco¬ nomics (see John Maynard Keynes); their economic theories became influ¬ ential in the 1970s and early 1980s. Monetarism holds that a change in the money supply directly affects and determines production, employ¬ ment, and price levels, though its influence is evident only over a long and often variable period of time. Fundamental to the monetarist approach is the rejection of fiscal policy in favour of “monetary rule.” Friedman and others asserted that fiscal measures such as tax-policy changes or increased government spending have little significant effect on the fluc¬ tuations of the business cycle. They argued that government intervention in the economy should be kept to a minimum and asserted that economic conditions would change before specific policy measures designed to address them could take effect. Steady, moderate growth of the money supply, in their view, offered the best hope of assuring a constant rate of economic growth with low inflation. U.S. economic performance in the 1980s cast doubts on monetarism, and the proliferation of new types of bank deposits made it difficult to calculate the money supply.
monetary policy Measures employed by governments to influence economic activity, specifically by manipulating the money supply and inter¬ est rates. Monetary and fiscal policy are two ways in which governments attempt to achieve or maintain high levels of employment, price stabil¬ ity, and economic growth. Monetary policy is directed by a nation’s cen¬ tral bank. In the U.S., monetary policy is the responsibility of the Federal Reserve System, which uses three main instruments: open-market operations, the discount rate, and reserve requirements. In the post-World War II era, economists reached a consensus that, in the long run, inflation results when the money supply grows at too rapid a rate. See also monetarism.
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1282 I money ► Mongolia
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money Commodity accepted by general consent as a medium of eco¬ nomic exchange. It is the medium in which prices and values are expressed; it circulates from person to person and country to country, thus facilitat¬ ing trade. Throughout history various commodities have been used as money, including seashells, beads, and cattle, but since the 17th century the most common forms have been metal coins, paper notes, and book¬ keeping entries. In standard economic theory, money is held to have four functions: to serve as a medium of exchange universally accepted in return for goods and services; to act as a measure of value, making possible the operation of the price system and the calculation of cost, profit, and loss; to serve as a standard of deferred payments, the unit in which loans are made and future transactions are fixed; and to provide a means of storing wealth not immediately required for use. Metals, especially gold and sil¬ ver, have been used for money for at least 4,000 years; standardized coins have been minted for perhaps 2,600 years. In the late 18th and early 19th century, banks began to issue notes redeemable in gold or silver, which became the principal money of industrial economies. Temporarily during World War I and permanently from the 1930s, most nations abandoned the gold standard. To most individuals today, money consists of coins, notes, and bank deposits. In terms of the economy, however, the total money supply is several times as large as the sum total of individual money holdings so defined, since most of the deposits placed in banks are loaned out, thus multiplying the money supply several times over. See also soft MONEY.
money, quantity theory of Economic theory relating changes in the price level to changes in the quantity of money. It has often been used to analyze the factors underlying inflation and deflation. The quantity theory was developed in the 17th and 18th centuries by philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume and was intended as a weapon against mer¬ cantilism. Drawing a distinction between money and wealth, advocates of the quantity theory argued that if the accumulation of money by a nation merely raised prices, the mercantilist emphasis on a favourable balance of trade would only increase the supply of money without increasing wealth. The theory contributed to the ascendancy of free trade over protectionism. In the 19th-20th centuries it played a part in the analysis of business cycles and in the theory of rates of foreign exchange.