#pureabstraction

Happy birthday Piet Mondrian!

“Composition in White, Red, and Yellow (1936) epitomizes Piet Mondrian’s lifelong attempt to express the pure and idealized inner reality of the cosmos. He pared his palette and vocabulary of form down to the primary colors plus black and white structured within a strict rectilinear framework. This rigorous asceticism, associated with the Dutch De Stijl (the Style) group and established by 1917, was Mondrian’s reaction to the horrors of World War I.

Having learned from Cézanne and Cubism that overlapping planes suggest depth, Mondrian, an early proponent of pure abstraction, eliminated them entirely. Composition in White, Red, and Yellow thus resolutely avoids any reference to three-dimensional space. The sense of a syncopated rhythm suggested by the unevenly spaced black lines hints at Mondrian’s love for music, particularly for jazz. The artist designed the frame for Composition in White, Red, and Yellow to bring the picture forward “to a more real existence,” in his own words, reinforcing the notion of the painting as an object in its own right.”

[Composition in White, Red, and Yellow, Piet Mondrian (Holland, 1872-1944), 1936, Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection]