Composition in red, yellow and blue by Piet Mondrian

A masterpiece of abstraction, the Composition in red, yellow and blue by Piet Mondrian illustrates the harmony of a completely abstracted composition almost like no other work of art, marking a subtle turning point in the development of the artist's distinctive painting style.

After the First World War, Mondrian is convinced that art has an important role to play in modern times. With his paintings he wants to express a universal harmony, through a balance between lines, surfaces and colors.

According to him, this balance can be made visible in the clearest and most powerful way with visual means that do not evoke an image. That is why in his work he only uses straight horizontal and vertical lines, the three primary colors red, yellow and blue and the non-colors white, black and gray.

In this Composition in red, yellow and blue, Piet Mondrian also tries to find balance. The large white surface of this canvas provides a resting point. Because this area is not placed in the center and is surrounded by the three color areas, the composition certainly does not appear static. It seems as if it is not limited by the size of the canvas and as if the painting continues beyond its limits.

It is noteworthy that, in addition to directly artistic compositions, Mondrian based his point of view on the trend of geometric abstraction in theoretical works. When creating compositions, the master uses three primary colors, and also uses shades of black and white.

Mondrian's painting is a complete worldview, where new art helps to understand better communication with the world. Composition in red, yellow and blue was created in the style of neoplasticism and is considered one of the best works of the author. The combination of straight lines and color inserts, built by the artist according to a principle known to him, creates a sense of timeless space.

Piet Cornelis Mondrian was born on March 7, 1872 in Amersfoort, a small town in the Netherlands, his father was a school principal. Since childhood, the boy was fond of drawing and, despite the fact that his environment was far from art, his parents found the opportunity to send him to study at the Academy of Arts in Amsterdam.

Parallel to his studies, Piet taught painting in elementary school. But a few years later, Mondrian had to return to his parental home for a year due to severe pneumonia.

Against the background of health problems, the young artist closed in on himself and did not leave the house for a long time. During this period Mondrian painted landscapes in the style of Impressionism. In 1911 Mondrian moved to Paris, ushering in an era of great change in his work.

In Paris, Piet became interested in non-figurative directions in painting and had a clear intention of joining the Parisian avant-garde. It was then that the artist finally abandoned objectivity and natural motifs and brought geometry and color to the fore.

In 1915, together with the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, Mondrian founded the De Stijl (Style) movement and began working on a new genre of painting: Neo-Plasticism. Mondrian called the primary elements of Neoplasticism lines, geometric shapes, and colors. In his own words, the artist decided to “limit his vocabulary to three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow, three primary meanings: black, white, and gray, and two main directions: horizontal and vertical.”

One of Piet Mondrian's main works, which includes all the main pictorial elements of Neo-Plasticism, is Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow from 1930. This minimalist composition consists of black lines of different thickness, a large red square and small yellow and blue rectangles. . The black lines limit only two sides of the rectangles, while the other two seem to go beyond the edges of the canvas.

The rectangles interact with each other, the big red square does not dominate the small ones, but is balanced by them. Despite the clear lines and thoughtful shapes, Mondrian brought this work to life, leaving barely noticeable sloppy brushstrokes.

In 1920, in which he also published his essay Le Neo Plasticisme, Mondrian painted his first pictures with grid patterns in black horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular fields of basic colors, for which he is probably best known today. Early in his exploration of this unique approach to painting, Mondrian experimented with different colors and explored a multitude of variations for both his canvases and the forms of his compositions.

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In the midst of this development story, he also painted the Composition in red, yellow, and blue. It may not be obvious why this work is remarkable or why it marks a major turning point. But there are some aspects that clearly distinguish this work from so many other paintings created by Mondrian. The Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue marks a point in Mondrian's artistic career when he transformed himself.

Some people say that you have to read between the lines to understand the real message of what a person is trying to express. In the case of The Composition in red, yellow and blue, it is the lines themselves that carry a hidden message. It is known that Mondrian sought a balance in his work. He wrote extensively on compositional harmony in response to chaos.

He achieved this sense of harmony by tirelessly striving for a balance between the various elements in his paintings. The placement of colors, the size of shapes, and the properties of surfaces clashed with each other in such a way that the artist considered them unbalanced or balanced. Piet Mondrian always searched for the perfect point where a composition achieved a kind of "silence".

But as time went on, Mondrian began to despise the sense of silence he was once seeking. His later paintings, which he created in New York and which were inspired by the movement of the city and the energy of jazz music, almost seem to vibrate. The Composition in red, yellow and blue thus marks a starting point for his ability to endow his images with this energy.

The secret is hidden in the lines. It may be almost imperceptible at first glance, but if you look at the black lines in this painting, you will see that the line in the upper left corner of the composition is twice as thick as the other lines.

Mondrian believed that this decision to make one of the lines twice as wide brought his composition to life. He changed his views from believing in silence as a universal necessity to the view that even a completely abstract and harmonious composition needs energy to be alive.

Despite the effort at energy and movement, which Mondrian expressed with the extended line, The Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue remains an outstanding demonstration of the image's harmony.

In a strange way, the energy introduced into the image through the general lines balances the other elements of the image that would otherwise seem too specific. In particular, the red square that dominates this image had to be invalidated by this trick. The weight of this square reflects the square shape of the canvas.

It is tempting to see the red square as the main theme of the work, which would have taken this image out of the realm of pure abstraction. Mondrian obviously tried to use as few pictorial elements as possible in the composition. With the tiny yellow rectangle at the bottom of the canvas, he jumped to the other end. He places a blue rectangle on the field in the lower left immediately adjacent to the red square.

Even so, it is curiously the black line that is twice as wide that suggests that there is actually more going on in this composition than a meeting of simple and colorful shapes. Mondrian didn't see his black lines as outlines, but as independent layers of color; an idea that can be seen in the horizontal black area at the bottom right of the image, which stops just short of the edge of the canvas (just above the yellow area).

Mondrian destroys the whole concept of pictorial depth, which is based on an image on a background. It achieves a harmonious tension through its asymmetrical arrangement of basic colors, which balance the blocks of white. Leaving the forms open in The Composition in red, yellow, and blue leaves us with the idea that the lines may never have been conceived as a framework.

Perhaps they were intended as fields of color that are equivalent to the other colorful shapes. In this painting, since they are not framed by black lines, the color fields could extend infinitely in space beyond the edge of the canvas. If so, it would be almost as if Mondrian cut out an image that he saw in his head.

In the Netherlands, Mondrian founded the De Stijl movement with the artist Theo van Doesburg. The two shared many ideas about art as an expression of relationships, especially the relationships between art and life. Because these artists believed that the evolution of art coincided with the modern advancement of humanity, they thought that the New Plasticism could and should encompass the entire human experience.

Van Doesburg founded the magazine De Stijl to promote these ideas and to show that his geometric abstraction, based on his theory of mental and artistic progress, forms a general environment that could influence modern life.

Although Mondrian and van Doesburg eventually parted ways, their movement to combine modern art and life was so influential that the abstract and geometric principles and use of primary colors that they used in painting, sculpture, design, and architecture continue to hold sway today.

Mondrian's paintings gained real popularity among the general public after Yves Saint Laurent's fall exhibition in 1965. The designer used blocks of color as a pattern for a wool mini dress called Mondrian.

Mondrian lattice printing is very popular today. He can now find not only shoes and accessories painted from the Dutch artist's paintings, but also interior items, cosmetics, phone cases and much more. In 2016, the Rumyantsev metro station in Moscow was opened, the decoration of which was carried out based on the works of Mondrian.