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Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue
Piet Mondrian, 1927
Piet Mondrian started as a painter of landscapes and moved through Cubism during the 1910s. The Cleveland Museum of Art says that his art then became more and more abstract, based on a grid.
By 1927, when he made this canvas, he had given up depicting anything from the natural world. He used only horizontal and vertical rectangles, the three primary colours of red, yellow and blue, plus black and white. The museum describes him as intensely intellectual and philosophical. He believed that, after the devastation of the First World War, such abstract compositions could encourage a more harmonious society by speaking a universal visual language.
The painting is small, only about 50 centimetres square. Look at how the sizes of the rectangles are balanced. A large white area is weighed against a small patch of red.
From the museum record
| Artist | Piet Mondrian |
|---|---|
| Date | 1927 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Size | Unframed: 49.5 x 49.5 cm |
| Museum | The Cleveland Museum of Art |
| Credit line | Contemporary Collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art |
| Accession number | 1967.215 |
| Licence | Open Access (CC0) |
Source: The Cleveland Museum of Art collection record. Facts such as dates, sizes and credit lines come from that record. The write-up above was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the museum record and standard references. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.
