Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow
Black lines, white fields and three primary colours. Mondrian sought a universal harmony by stripping away everything but the most fundamental.
The large red field is balanced by small areas of blue and yellow – asymmetry in equilibrium.
Piet Mondrian painted Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow in Paris in 1930. He was Dutch and had started out as a landscape painter in a traditional style. Under the influence of Cubism and Theosophy he simplified his painting step by step. In 1917 he co-founded the journal and movement De Stijl. The painting belongs to the Kunsthaus Zürich.
The picture is almost square and fairly small, less than half a metre on each side. Black lines divide the surface into rectangles. A large red field fills the upper right. A small blue field sits in the lower left corner and a small yellow one in the lower right corner. The remaining fields are white or pale grey.
The composition is based on asymmetrical balance. The large red field is heavy and could dominate the picture, but the small blue and yellow fields and the white areas balance it. The lines vary in thickness, and several of them stop short of the edge. This makes the picture seem to continue beyond its borders.
Mondrian used only the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow, together with white, black and grey. He called his system Neoplasticism. The colours were to be pure and free of nature’s accidents. He believed that straight lines and pure colours could express a universal harmony, something beyond the individual and personal.
Although the picture looks as if it had been made with a ruler, it is painted by hand. The surface shows brushstrokes, and the white fields have several layers of paint in slightly different tones. Mondrian moved lines and fields many times before he was satisfied. He worked intuitively and judged the balance by eye, not by mathematical calculation.
In the 1920s Mondrian broke with his De Stijl colleague Theo van Doesburg, partly because van Doesburg introduced diagonal lines. For Mondrian the horizontal and the vertical were fundamental, and he held fast to them. He later left Paris for London and in 1940 moved to New York, where his painting became more rhythmic and colourful. In Paris he had furnished his studio in the same spirit, with coloured panels on the walls, so that the room itself became a kind of composition. He died in New York in 1944.
Mondrian’s compositions had an enormous influence on design, architecture and fashion. In 1965 the couturier Yves Saint Laurent created a collection of dresses using his patterns, and the gridded fields have been used on everything from book covers to packaging. Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow is one of the most typical examples of his mature style.