Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian pioneered abstract painting in Amsterdam in the early 20th century. Breaking from standards of figurative realism, he began using the modernist building blocks of pure form and color to depict the world around him. While his early landscapes appear traditional, by 1905 he had started using trees and horizon lines to emphasize background colors and to structure the spaces in his compositions.

Mondrian devoted himself to devising an art of “universal beauty” grounded in what he termed “pure plastic art,” and alongside Theo van Doesburg, he founded the Dutch art movement known as De Stijl or Neoplasticism in 1917. His new paintings treated color itself as modifiable material, so that looking at them might be a unique experience of considering movement and organization. By restricting himself to primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), primary values (black, white, and gray), and primary directions (horizontal and vertical), Mondrian created what he believed was a precise method toward beauty. He played with various combinations of these factors in his Compositions, decreasing the number of colored segments and darkening and widening his dividing lines. The Art Institute’s Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray (1921) showcases his further experiments in orientation by turning his canvases by 45 degrees.

Upon his arrival in New York City in 1940, Mondrian began revisiting his long-held practice of moving colored rectangles of paper around his studio, and his typical black compositional lines started to incorporate the primary colors. Blue and yellow jostle freely in these paintings that appear like maps, or indeed scores for city life—but this new period of experimentation was cut short by his death in 1944.