Works by Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian painted Dutch windmills, dunes and trees for years before he cut his pictures down to black lines on white with red, blue and yellow. Both sides of that change appear below.

With his uncle, a pupil of Willem Maris of the Hague School, the young Mondriaan, as he still spelled it, painted along the river Gein. The Red Tree of 1909 is still a tree at dusk, its trunk red and its branches dark blue against a blue sky. In 1911 he saw the Cubist exhibition in Amsterdam, and in Gray Tree of that year the branches are sweeping black arcs on grey and white, every other colour gone. In 1912 he moved to Paris and dropped an 'a' from his name.

Kept in the Netherlands by the First World War, he painted a farm near Duivendrecht again, a subject he had first sketched around 1905, probably because wartime patrons preferred such scenes to his Cubist work. In the version from about 1916 bare trees arch over a white farmhouse doubled in still water.

Back in Paris after the war, by 1921 he had reached thick black lines around a few large fields of colour and white. In Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue, from 1921, several lines stop short of the edge; in Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow of 1930 every one runs out to it, and a red square fills the upper right. In the tilted square of the Lozenge Composition, also 1921, the black line above the blue runs on to the slanting edge, as if the picture went on beyond it.

Sources: Wikipedia, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Kunsthaus Zürich, Art Institute of Chicago.