Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Piet Mondrian
Dutch; 20th-century
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
82%
Composition No. IV, with Red, Blue, and Yellow. 1929. Oil on canvas
There are no internally-bounded rectangular units here, so the backset double-frame structure — by which, in all his abstractions, Mondrian cultivates the implication of his forms' infinite extension beyond the bounds of the canvas, but without disrupting the internal cohesion and completeness of his pictures as pictures — is more necessary than usual. Due to the paucity of formal elements on the surface of the canvas, what becomes especially noticeable in this piece is the precise relation of the two frames to the painted structures they offset and enclose: the bands of black are just barely wider than the first white frame; this serves to emphasize the supremacy, over its object-qualities, of the pictorial aspects of the overall frame-frame-painting tableau. Then there's the bottom edge of the red plane, which almost doubles its width compared to the rest of the lines, thereby making itself the gravitational core of the whole construction. But as soon as you begin to wrap your head around these connections, which despite their subtlety can grow to seem somewhat mathematical, you notice that the canvas-spanning horizontal band is actually TILTED downwards, just a little. What does this do to the total effect of the painting? Honestly, I don't know. It's just Mondrian at his most jovial, exhibiting such a mastery of the techniques he'd invented that he could treat them with utmost flippancy and still make good on the principles that underlay them. (TFS, 2026)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Stedelijk Museum
81%
Composition with Blue, Yellow, Red, Black, and Gray. 1922. Oil on canvas
That huge gray plane is so domineering, and then it's activated as an undeniably pictorial phenomenon through such an economy of means. This is a good Mondrian. On its face it's good because of the compelling force-counterforce relation between that main gray plane and all its peripheral rectangles, which appear at once to be repelled to the edges of the canvas by the weight of the big square, at once to be nipping inwards at its heels and bringing it to order. This is the painting's central dynamic, but outside of it there are moments of (Mondrian's quiet version of) pure painterly expressivity, too, which both liven the scene and soften its effect. The most obvious of these moments is the extreme truncating of the lower branch of the backwards "F" at left. It serves to strengthen (by combining and complicating) these two light white boxes, while they ready themselves to square up against the slightly darker big one to their right. But it also (this truncation) has an inexplicably poetic effect. Even more subtle and songful, there's discrepancy in the widths by which each black band overlaps its colored plane: yellow, by maybe a centimeter; red, hardly a millimeter; blue's horizontal, a couple millimeters; blue's vertical, no space at all. Within the deceptive rigidity of Mondrian's program, such little flourishes animate forms and relativize their relations. If there's something to fault this painting for, it's that the playful refusal of its black bands to ever touch the canvas's edge can seem like an overcorrection for the imposing quality of the central square. (TFS, 2026)
The Hague, The Netherlands: Kunstmuseum Den Haag
79%
Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Gray, and Blue. 1921. Oil on canvas
The task Mondrian has set for himself is to throw that large red plane into some sort of depth, difficult considering how obstinate it is as a literal surface. The painting succeeds by way of that other red segment at bottom right, which is bounded at top by the only black line that hits an edge of the canvas, such that all the other forms (besides the firmly lodged main red plane) come to feel unfixed and contingent, capable of reconfiguring and reconfiguring the ways they relate to whole of the arrangement and each of its constituent parts. And so by turns the titular red segment dips behind the black grid below it and crawls ahead of the yellow blocks to its right, etc. It should be noted, though, that Mondrian achieves the same or similar effects with all of his successful compositions in this style, though frequently with much more grace (i.e. far fewer formal means) than this painting. It feels a little clogged compared to Piet's best. (TFS, 2026)
The Hague, The Netherlands: Kunstmuseum Den Haag
72%
Mill; mill in sunlight. 1908. Oil on canvas
Some's good, some's bad, but all of Mondrian's work from before he settled into his famous style suffers from not really having figured out the function of modernism. This picture uses the vocabulary of the advanced art of its moment, but it doesn't quite speak the same language. The yellows against the reds feel like misapprehended Matisse or exaggerated Van Gogh; the mill is actually too well-drawn to make much out of the ways its surface — and really only its surface — has been corrupted. The best passage is the sky, where Mondrian manages to build a sense of volume out of little more than the relative distribution of blue and gold. Nor should it be discounted how well the picture hangs together despite its mess of different sorts of marks: the pond below the mill concentrates the image, resolving the tension between the layered staccato strokes in the foreground, the dragged lines in the building, and the fat patches of paint behind it. Yet this success is to a large extent merely technical, an achievement in forcing these disparate forms to coexist but not in justifying their coexistence through some overarching spatial logic. (TFS, 2026)
The Hague, The Netherlands: Kunstmuseum Den Haag
69%
Composition with Yellow Lines. 1933. Oil on canvas
The positions and the widths of the four yellow lines are varied, which makes both the exterior triangles and the interior clipped-rectangle productively, ever so slightly irregular. This irregularity, as always in Mondrian, is the source not only of visual intrigue but of surprising depth effects, which are what make this painting "painting" rather than design. The white form enclosed by the yellow bands dips away from the picture plane to the right, for instance, while the left outer triangle seems to hover just barely further forwards than the bottom one. That said, Mondrian's spare diamond-shaped canvases are generally less capable than his rectangular pieces of parrying the charges of "decorativeness," and this painting is no exception. It implies pictoriality, but never quite convinces you that you ought not to experience it as anything other than a picture. The busier "boogie" works to come would solve this problem, but with less grace than the classic works. (TFS, 2026)