Programme 7: Abstracting Landscape

The Art Works

Title: Sun, Church in Zeeland
Artist: Piet Mondrian
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 1910

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) only gradually worked his way towards the abstract style that is instantly recognisable as his. His early paintings, such as Sun, Church in Zeeland, were more representational. Although not detailed, this is clearly recognisable as the tower of a church, its bold, upright form contrasting with the horizontal of the ground, shown as a strip at the bottom of the painting.

The colours are heightened, to express the brightness of the sun, but there are nevertheless only a few basic colours: an orangey-red, an orangey-yellow and a blue. The paint is applied in small, broad, separated brushstrokes, the colours being mingled together to create a sense of unity.

Title: Tree
Artist: Piet Mondrian
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: c.1913

In this painting Mondrian has been influenced by the muted colours of the cubist paintings he saw in Paris. He has looked at a tree and broken it down into its basic forms – the vertical trunk and branches growing both upward and outward. Although there are some diagonal lines, he has tended to break these down into their horizontal and vertical components. The colours are very subdued but are nevertheless versions of the ones seen before: the reds have become golden brown, and the yellows and blue-greys are very subtle.

Title: Composition with Grey, Red, Yellow and Blue
Artist: Piet Mondrian
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 1920–c.1926

By 1920 Mondrian had turned to an overtly abstract style of painting, although this developed from the elements which had most interested him in his earlier works. He uses horizontal and vertical lines, and the colours are now clearly recognisable as the primary colours red, yellow and blue. He also uses three tones in this work – black, and two shades of grey.

Title: Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue
Artist: Piet Mondrian
Medium: Oil on canvas
Date: 1937–42

It was not long after 1920 that Mondrian realised that grey was not a fundamental aspect of painting. Unlike horizontal and vertical lines and the three primary colours grey was not an absolute, so he removed it from his palette to concentrate on black and white. If painting is about line, colour and tone, then his paintings work on the basic building blocks – every line can be defined by its components of horizontal and vertical, every colour by red, blue and yellow, and every tone is on the grey scale between black and white. Mondrian wanted to use these elements to build up a pure and balanced style of painting, as he believed this would help us to live more ordered, straightforward and harmonious lifestyles.

Visit the Glossary for words in bold.