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Lot Essay
Dating from 1935, Composition A with Double Line and Yellow is a powerfully dynamic painting by Piet Mondrian, featuring what was still a relatively recent compositional innovation in his work: the dramatic tensions conjured by the double line. There is a serene, almost minimal economy of means to the composition—a single vertical line is crossed by the two parallel bars of black towards the top left corner of the canvas, generating a carefully constructed internal energy within the asymmetric configuration. Above, one of the slender rectangles created by their intersection is filled with a bright yellow paint. Hovering on the periphery of the composition, this plane of colour appears to radiate upwards, beyond the limits of the canvas. Together, these few elements imbue the canvas with a delicate sense of balance and a vivid energy, the precise configuration of their interactions and contrasts revealing the inherent complexity of Mondrian’s mature, visionary aesthetic at this stage of his career.
Mondrian had first struck upon the idea of doubling his linear elements in 1932, writing to the De Stijl architect J.J.P. Oud in a letter dated 22 December about the important new strand of thinking that was emerging in his latest compositions: ‘I am doing new research: canvases with double lines,’ he explained, ‘which enable me to achieve much greater clarity’ (quoted in Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 254). This was a pivotal period of refinement and evolution in Mondrian’s unique pictorial language—for more than a decade, he had diligently explored the visual possibilities of Neo-Plasticism, the revolutionary approach to abstraction he had pioneered in 1919 and 1920. Using a highly refined, minimalist aesthetic that relied on the fundamental elements of painting—the straight line, primary colours and the three non-colours of black, white and grey—Mondrian believed that he could create an idealised pictorial form of pure equilibrium that would reintegrate a fundamental sense of beauty and harmony into life.
The introduction of the double line to his repertoire in 1932 opened an entirely new chapter in Mondrian’s art, and built upon the developments of his so-called “classical phase” of the late 1920s with its spare and reductive purity. The impact of the double black line was often enhanced by Mondrian’s use of a strictly limited palette, so that our focus is concentrated on the interaction of the linear elements. In contrast to his earlier double-line canvases, such as Composition with Double Line and Yellow (Joosten, no. B237; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), in the present work Mondrian allows a wider space to develop between the pair of horizontal lines, exploring a different visual tension in the space between the two and lending an alternative sense of motion and tempo to the composition. In a letter from the beginning of the year, Mondrian outlined this new direction with the motif: ‘In my last things the double line widens to form a plane, and yet it remains a line. Be that as it may, I believe that this question is one of those which may lie beyond the realm of theory, and which are of such subtlety that they are rooted in the mystery of “art.” But all that is not yet clear in my mind!’ (Letter to J. Gorin, 31 January 1934; quoted in C. Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction, London, 1994, p. 215).
As with all of Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic paintings, the almost extreme minimalism of Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow belies the intense search for perfection and prolonged contemplation that lay behind the creation of the work. Hans Janssen has noted that by the mid-1930s ‘[Mondrian’s] painting had increasingly become a matter of… considering, polishing, concentration and pondering over the result…,’ with the artist ruminating at length on the potential tensions and effects of different lines and pigments in particular combinations with one another, before reaching the final iteration of a composition (Piet Mondrian: A Life, London, 2022, p. 325).
The present picture appears to have been begun in early 1934—it was photographed by the American designer Eugene Lux on a visit to Mondrian’s studio with his wife, the sculptor Gwendoline Lux, in April of that year. During this visit, Mondrian showed the couple a number of works in progress, including several canvases in which the vestiges of the artist’s preliminary charcoal lines remained clearly visible on the surface. Two months later, Mondrian wrote to Lux to request copies of the photos he had taken that day, even though they showed the works in their ‘primitive and imperfect’ states (letter to E. Lux 6 September 1934; quoted in J.M. Joosten, Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné of the Work of 1911-1944, vol. II, Antwerp, 1998, p. 371). ‘Perhaps towards the end of the year,’ he wrote, ‘I can send you photos of the ones you saw me working on—which are slowly nearing completion’ (ibid.). In November, he reported ‘I have been working hard and am beginning to see results; I am sure you would be amazed to see the paintings now’ (letter to E. Lux 17 November 1934; quoted in ibid.).
Mondrian appears to have reached a conclusion on Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow early the following year, announcing in a letter to Winifred Nicholson in January that the work was now ready for exhibition. John Milner, in his key monograph on Mondrian’s oeuvre, discusses the essential beauty Mondrian achieved in the picture—‘[Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow], which comprises only three lines, white and a plane of yellow, has an optimistic, light-filled dynamic to it. The sense of rising and elevation is clear… Every plane here still expands off the canvas and the yellow encourages this expansion without adding significant weight to the plane that it pervades. It is an elegant achievement’ (Mondrian, London, 1992, p. 195). Mondrian was clearly pleased with the result—shortly after the work was completed, it was sent to Lucerne to feature in These, Antithese, Synthese, an important exhibition organised at the Kunstmuseum by Hans Erni.
Composition A with Double Line and Yellow was subsequently acquired by the writer, critic, art historian and curator, James Johnson Sweeney in the June of 1935. Born in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century, Sweeney travelled from New York to Paris as a young man in his twenties, before undertaking a degree in literature at Cambridge University. During the 1930s, he was an editor at the experimental literary journal Transition, where he was involved in editing and publishing pieces by James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Marcel Duchamp, and many other members of the European avant-garde. A tireless advocate for modernism, Sweeney wrote eloquently on the most adventurous and thought-provoking aspects of contemporary art, and was a particular champion of abstract or “nonobjective” painting. In 1935, he was hired as a curator at The Museum of Modern Art in New York by Alfred H. Barr, and was soon invited to take on the position of Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture. During his time at MoMA, Sweeney played a central role in the organisation of a number of forward-looking shows in the institution’s early history.
Sweeney appears to have first encountered Composition A with Double Line and Yellow in November 1934, when he and his wife Laura paid a visit to Mondrian’s studio on the rue de Départ. The artist was impressed by him, describing him as ‘a very open-minded man with a modern outlook’ (letter to E. Lux, 17 November 1934; quoted in Joosten, op. cit., 1998, p. 376). According to Mondrian, Sweeney had enquired as to the possibility of acquiring Composition A with Double Line and Yellow, but found the asking price beyond his budget. However, the painting continued to fascinate Sweeney through the ensuing months. In June 1935, the artist wrote to his close friend, the artist Charley Toorop, with the happy news that the collector had changed his mind: ‘I asked 3000 francs, which was too expensive for him. But I couldn’t do it for less and so he left. The other day, however, he wrote me asking to send it, and he sent me the 3000 francs! So the ravens are bringing me bread! In spite of all my troubles, I’m lucky nevertheless’ (letter to C. Toorop, 8 June 1935; quoted in ibid., p. 376).
Sweeney loaned Composition A with Double Line and Yellow to the seminal posthumous memorial exhibition devoted to Mondrian’s work at MoMA in 1945. Writing on the occasion of this show, Sweeney eloquently described the central tenets of the artist’s work and its enduring appeal: ‘Mondrian’s fundamental aim in art was to transcend the particular to express the universal. He was the great uncompromising classicist of the early 20th century… For Mondrian reality was that essential quality we find in nature, not its surface appearances. The appearances of natural things were constantly changing, but this living quality, this inner reality of nature, was constant—universal. In his opinion a truly universal art should provide through its own medium an equivalent for this inner reality, or living quality, rather than merely a reflection of surface features. In other words, he wanted a cleaner universal basis of expression than naturalistic representation could give him—a purer base for the universal expression of the classicist than any painter before him had achieved’ (‘Piet Mondrian’ in The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, vol. 12, no. 4, Spring 1945, p. 9).
Mondrian had first struck upon the idea of doubling his linear elements in 1932, writing to the De Stijl architect J.J.P. Oud in a letter dated 22 December about the important new strand of thinking that was emerging in his latest compositions: ‘I am doing new research: canvases with double lines,’ he explained, ‘which enable me to achieve much greater clarity’ (quoted in Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 254). This was a pivotal period of refinement and evolution in Mondrian’s unique pictorial language—for more than a decade, he had diligently explored the visual possibilities of Neo-Plasticism, the revolutionary approach to abstraction he had pioneered in 1919 and 1920. Using a highly refined, minimalist aesthetic that relied on the fundamental elements of painting—the straight line, primary colours and the three non-colours of black, white and grey—Mondrian believed that he could create an idealised pictorial form of pure equilibrium that would reintegrate a fundamental sense of beauty and harmony into life.
The introduction of the double line to his repertoire in 1932 opened an entirely new chapter in Mondrian’s art, and built upon the developments of his so-called “classical phase” of the late 1920s with its spare and reductive purity. The impact of the double black line was often enhanced by Mondrian’s use of a strictly limited palette, so that our focus is concentrated on the interaction of the linear elements. In contrast to his earlier double-line canvases, such as Composition with Double Line and Yellow (Joosten, no. B237; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), in the present work Mondrian allows a wider space to develop between the pair of horizontal lines, exploring a different visual tension in the space between the two and lending an alternative sense of motion and tempo to the composition. In a letter from the beginning of the year, Mondrian outlined this new direction with the motif: ‘In my last things the double line widens to form a plane, and yet it remains a line. Be that as it may, I believe that this question is one of those which may lie beyond the realm of theory, and which are of such subtlety that they are rooted in the mystery of “art.” But all that is not yet clear in my mind!’ (Letter to J. Gorin, 31 January 1934; quoted in C. Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction, London, 1994, p. 215).
As with all of Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic paintings, the almost extreme minimalism of Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow belies the intense search for perfection and prolonged contemplation that lay behind the creation of the work. Hans Janssen has noted that by the mid-1930s ‘[Mondrian’s] painting had increasingly become a matter of… considering, polishing, concentration and pondering over the result…,’ with the artist ruminating at length on the potential tensions and effects of different lines and pigments in particular combinations with one another, before reaching the final iteration of a composition (Piet Mondrian: A Life, London, 2022, p. 325).
The present picture appears to have been begun in early 1934—it was photographed by the American designer Eugene Lux on a visit to Mondrian’s studio with his wife, the sculptor Gwendoline Lux, in April of that year. During this visit, Mondrian showed the couple a number of works in progress, including several canvases in which the vestiges of the artist’s preliminary charcoal lines remained clearly visible on the surface. Two months later, Mondrian wrote to Lux to request copies of the photos he had taken that day, even though they showed the works in their ‘primitive and imperfect’ states (letter to E. Lux 6 September 1934; quoted in J.M. Joosten, Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné of the Work of 1911-1944, vol. II, Antwerp, 1998, p. 371). ‘Perhaps towards the end of the year,’ he wrote, ‘I can send you photos of the ones you saw me working on—which are slowly nearing completion’ (ibid.). In November, he reported ‘I have been working hard and am beginning to see results; I am sure you would be amazed to see the paintings now’ (letter to E. Lux 17 November 1934; quoted in ibid.).
Mondrian appears to have reached a conclusion on Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow early the following year, announcing in a letter to Winifred Nicholson in January that the work was now ready for exhibition. John Milner, in his key monograph on Mondrian’s oeuvre, discusses the essential beauty Mondrian achieved in the picture—‘[Composition A, with Double Line and Yellow], which comprises only three lines, white and a plane of yellow, has an optimistic, light-filled dynamic to it. The sense of rising and elevation is clear… Every plane here still expands off the canvas and the yellow encourages this expansion without adding significant weight to the plane that it pervades. It is an elegant achievement’ (Mondrian, London, 1992, p. 195). Mondrian was clearly pleased with the result—shortly after the work was completed, it was sent to Lucerne to feature in These, Antithese, Synthese, an important exhibition organised at the Kunstmuseum by Hans Erni.
Composition A with Double Line and Yellow was subsequently acquired by the writer, critic, art historian and curator, James Johnson Sweeney in the June of 1935. Born in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century, Sweeney travelled from New York to Paris as a young man in his twenties, before undertaking a degree in literature at Cambridge University. During the 1930s, he was an editor at the experimental literary journal Transition, where he was involved in editing and publishing pieces by James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas, Marcel Duchamp, and many other members of the European avant-garde. A tireless advocate for modernism, Sweeney wrote eloquently on the most adventurous and thought-provoking aspects of contemporary art, and was a particular champion of abstract or “nonobjective” painting. In 1935, he was hired as a curator at The Museum of Modern Art in New York by Alfred H. Barr, and was soon invited to take on the position of Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture. During his time at MoMA, Sweeney played a central role in the organisation of a number of forward-looking shows in the institution’s early history.
Sweeney appears to have first encountered Composition A with Double Line and Yellow in November 1934, when he and his wife Laura paid a visit to Mondrian’s studio on the rue de Départ. The artist was impressed by him, describing him as ‘a very open-minded man with a modern outlook’ (letter to E. Lux, 17 November 1934; quoted in Joosten, op. cit., 1998, p. 376). According to Mondrian, Sweeney had enquired as to the possibility of acquiring Composition A with Double Line and Yellow, but found the asking price beyond his budget. However, the painting continued to fascinate Sweeney through the ensuing months. In June 1935, the artist wrote to his close friend, the artist Charley Toorop, with the happy news that the collector had changed his mind: ‘I asked 3000 francs, which was too expensive for him. But I couldn’t do it for less and so he left. The other day, however, he wrote me asking to send it, and he sent me the 3000 francs! So the ravens are bringing me bread! In spite of all my troubles, I’m lucky nevertheless’ (letter to C. Toorop, 8 June 1935; quoted in ibid., p. 376).
Sweeney loaned Composition A with Double Line and Yellow to the seminal posthumous memorial exhibition devoted to Mondrian’s work at MoMA in 1945. Writing on the occasion of this show, Sweeney eloquently described the central tenets of the artist’s work and its enduring appeal: ‘Mondrian’s fundamental aim in art was to transcend the particular to express the universal. He was the great uncompromising classicist of the early 20th century… For Mondrian reality was that essential quality we find in nature, not its surface appearances. The appearances of natural things were constantly changing, but this living quality, this inner reality of nature, was constant—universal. In his opinion a truly universal art should provide through its own medium an equivalent for this inner reality, or living quality, rather than merely a reflection of surface features. In other words, he wanted a cleaner universal basis of expression than naturalistic representation could give him—a purer base for the universal expression of the classicist than any painter before him had achieved’ (‘Piet Mondrian’ in The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, vol. 12, no. 4, Spring 1945, p. 9).