Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black
Piet Mondrian (1872 to 1944) · 1922
A white square canvas is divided by a few black lines into rectangles, most of them white, with a large blue block in one corner, a strip of red, a small yellow rectangle and a patch of black. That is all, and it is one of the most influential kinds of picture made in the twentieth century. Mondrian painted it in Paris in 1922, two years after he had reduced his art to what he called the elements: straight horizontal and vertical lines, the three primary colours, and white, black and grey. He believed that these elements, balanced against one another, expressed a universal harmony that lay beneath the changing appearance of the world.
The painting rewards close looking, because nothing in it is mechanical. Stand near and you will see that the black lines vary in width and that some stop short of the edge, that the white areas are not one white but several, brushed in different directions, and that the coloured planes are slightly textured. Mondrian moved the lines by fractions of a centimetre, sometimes over months, until the composition felt right; the balance is intuitive, not calculated. Notice the way the big blue rectangle at the edge seems to weigh the composition to one side, and how the small yellow and the black hold it back.
Mondrian's grids became the visual language of modern design, from architecture to fashion, and the museum bought this canvas to represent the leap into abstraction in its chapter on the modern world. It hangs there with works of the same years from Europe and elsewhere. Mondrian was a slow, solitary worker who produced only a few paintings a year and lived in a studio painted like one of his canvases; when he died in New York in 1944 he was working on a picture inspired by boogie-woogie.
Did You Know? Mondrian hated the colour green and the sight of trees, and is said to have turned his chair away from the window in a cafe to avoid looking at them.
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