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Lot Essay
Signed and dated “PM 39-41,” Composition with Red and Blue is a rare example of Piet Mondrian’s so-called “transatlantic paintings,” a small but significant series of seventeen oils he completed over the course of several tumultuous years. Written in precise, discreet lettering on the lower black bar of the carefully balanced abstract composition, this small annotation places the painting in a pivotal, seismic moment, not only in the artist’s career, but also history. A pioneering abstract painter and co-founder of De Stijl, Mondrian had fled his home in Paris in 1938 after almost two decades living in the French capital, as the ever-worsening political situation threatened to engulf Europe in war. Travelling first to London, then on to New York, he was accompanied on his journey by a collection of canvases, some of which he had begun in Paris, others which were conceived along the way. Each of the pictures were completed, adjusted and altered in stages over the span of several years and marked with two dates by the artist, reflecting their gradual evolution as Mondrian voyaged westward. Composition with Red and Blue is among this select group of paintings the artist began in Europe and finished in New York, reflecting the artist’s unwavering devotion to his art, even during the most trying of times.
Mondrian was 66 years old when Hitler’s forces marched through the streets of Vienna in the spring of 1938. The previous year, the artist’s work had been included in the now infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) show in Munich, the culmination of an ambitious propaganda campaign by the Nazis to vilify, censure and confiscate any artworks they considered inconsistent with their ideology, most notably those of the modernist avant-garde. On the walls of this controversial exhibition, paintings by Max Beckmann, Franz Marc and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were hung alongside masterpieces by Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall, while derisive graffiti, proclaiming “Madness will be the Method” and “Crazy at any Price,” was scattered throughout the display. Mondrian, who was represented by at least two paintings in the exhibition, was profoundly shaken by the event. As talk of war accelerated over the ensuing months, compounded by news of the Anschluss in March, he made plans to leave his beloved Paris. The artist had initially hoped to sail straight for America, but insufficient funds forced him to alter his course, and he was persuaded to travel to London instead.
Mondrian had been drawn to the city in part by his friendships with a number of British painters and artists, several of whom he had met in Paris during the course of the 1930s, such as Winifred Nicholson. Less than a week after his arrival, Mondrian moved into a small one-bedroom apartment at 60 Parkhill Road in Hampstead, not far from his fellow artists Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. As he had in Paris, the artist swiftly set about redesigning his surroundings to best suit his artistic practice, painting the entire space a brilliant, dazzling white, including the smattering of furniture dotted around the rooms. On the walls he then hung rectangular pieces of primary-colored cardboard at regular intervals, which he could move and shift at will—“Within a week, Piet Mondrian had turned it into his Montparnasse studio,” recalled Hepworth (quoted in J.M. Joosten, op. cit., 1998, vol. II, p. 170). After just a month, Mondrian happily reported to his brother Carel that he had achieved “the most important thing, I’m getting on with my work much better here. I can see that it is greatly influenced by these new surroundings” (ibid.).
It was in this positive state of mind that Mondrian embarked upon Composition with Red and Blue in December 1938, showcasing the refined elegance and visual richness of his Neo-Plastic vocabulary. For almost two decades, he had diligently explored the formal possibilities of this revolutionary language of abstraction, as he sought to create an idealized pictorial form of pure equilibrium that would reintegrate a fundamental sense of beauty, order and balance to everyday life. “What do I want to express in my work?” Mondrian wrote. “Nothing other than what every artist seeks: to express harmony through the equivalence of relationships of lines, colors and planes. But only in the clearest and strongest way” (quoted in H. Holtzman and M.S. James, eds., The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, London, 1986, p. 282).
Working with extreme rigor and exactness, the deceptive simplicity of the interplay of elements within the composition—straight lines, pure color, and a bright white ground—belies the hours of deliberation, revision and reflection that marked Mondrian’s approach to painting. He would continually make minute changes to the various elements, adjusting the arrangement of a form, shifting the position and thickness of his lines, reducing or enhancing the strength of a color, before he was satisfied that he had reached a level of clarity and balance within his work. The British art critic Herbert Read recalled, “I once noticed, through a period of two or three visits that he always engaged in painting the black lines of the same picture, and I asked him whether it was a question of the exact width of the line. He answered No; it was the intensity, which could only be achieved by repeated applications of paint” (quoted in J. Milner, Mondrian, London, 1992, p. 202).
By July 1939, Mondrian was sufficiently happy with the picture to include Composition with Red and Blue, along with two other new pictures in an exhibition at Galerie Charpentier in Paris, entitled Réalités Nouvelles. Co-organized by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, this was among the most comprehensive exhibitions of abstract art organized in France in the years immediately preceding the war, and took its name from a quote by Guillaume Apollinaire. Here, the present work hung beside Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: Nom III (1938, Joosten, no. B284; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), as well as the first state of Composition of Red and White: Nom I (1938, Joosten, no. B285/313; Saint Louis Art Museum), while paintings from Wassily Kandinsky and sculptures by Naum Gabo were arranged nearby. Shown together on a single stretch of wall, the trio of paintings by Mondrian not only illustrated the recent developments in his style, but also the richness and potential of the artist’s aesthetic, as the seemingly restricted language of geometric form conjured entirely different visual experiences, depending on the arrangement of the various elements.
Since the early 1930s, Mondrian had leaned towards a greater sense of complexity and rhythm in his compositions—stepping away from the meditative, restrained style of his so called “classical period,” his paintings displayed a bold new tempo, as he increased the number of lines, crossings and segments within his canvases. In 1933, he introduced the use of double lines arranged in close proximity to one another, the space between them carefully analyzed and measured to generate a profound tension. Works such as Composition with Double Line and Yellow and Blue (1933, Joosten, no. B238; The Hilti Art Foundation) represented a subtle yet dramatic breakthrough in the artist’s idiosyncratic vocabulary, ushering in a new spirit and energy to his pictures. By 1938, these black verticals and horizontals had multiplied and pictures like Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: Nom III and Opposition of Lines, Red and Yellow (Joosten, no. B273; The Philadelphia Museum of Art) show Mondrian using them to progressively compartmentalize his canvases into a network of smaller, sub-rectangles and squares.
In Composition with Red and Blue, Mondrian draws the viewer’s eye towards a series of successive horizontal lines concentrated in the upper portion of the canvas, executed in meticulously applied layers of deep black pigment, their bold forms contrasting with the simplicity of the adjoining planes of pure white. In Composition with Red and Black from 1936 (Joosten, no. B269; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) a similar pattern of three closely aligned horizontal lines is inverted, arranged in the lower right corner of the picture to create a ladder-like effect which suggests upwards movement. In contrast, there is a distinct solidity to their placement and presence within the present canvas, generating a vivid sense of structure. The space between these rhythmic lines are not precisely equal either, differing slightly from one segment to the next. Driven by intuition rather than any mathematical formula or preconceived plan, Mondrian sought to temper and “orchestrate” the effects of his lines through such subtle adjustments and revisions as he worked. The diagonal placement of the red and blue color planes in Composition with Red and Blue, meanwhile, at the very corners of the painting, brings a further sense of equilibrium to the picture, creating a dynamic energy that seems to push our focus inwards towards the center of the canvas.
Mondrian remained in London for two years, and though he began several new compositions, he completed only two pictures during this time. By 1940 he had almost ceased painting altogether—the fall of Paris to the Germans, followed by the nightly air raids during the Blitz left his nerves in shreds. The bombing of a building near his home proved the final straw for Mondrian, and in September he boarded a ship bound for America. His unfinished pictures and painting equipment followed him across the ocean, arriving three months later in Manhattan. Tucked among the crates of canvases was Composition with Red and Blue, which joined the other “transatlantic pictures” in the artist’s new studio on First Avenue, propped against the walls as they waited for him to return to them. Mondrian had been immediately dazzled by New York, with its breathless dynamism and modernity, its grid-like street plan and vertiginous skyscrapers, and extraordinary mixture of cultures, music and art. Above all, Mondrian felt at home among the throng of European artists who had sought refuge there during the Second World War, many of whom attended the soirees and salons of the flamboyant collector Peggy Guggenheim. Here, Mondrian renewed his friendships with André Breton, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp. He also became acquainted with a new generation of young American artists through Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
Life in the busy metropolis reinvigorated Mondrian, and he returned to his unfinished and in-progress canvases with a renewed vitality. The following three years would constitute one of the most exciting and adventurous periods of his career, as he sought to convey a vivid impression of his new surroundings within his abstract paintings. “He was terrifically impressed with the dynamism he found in New York and wanted to make his paintings dynamic,” recalled his close friend Charmion von Wiegand, in an interview with Margit Rowell. “They were too classically balanced once he looked at them through American eyes. But rather than start a new painting with a new idea, he tried out his new ideas on old paintings” (“Interview with Charmion von Wiegand, by Margit Rowell, 20 June 1971,” in exh. cat., op. cit., 1971, p. 80). This new-found vigor would lead Mondrian to complete over 25 pictures in an astonishing burst of creativity, including Composition with Red and Blue. Though it is difficult to pinpoint the exact alterations the artist executed after he returned to the composition following the 1939 exhibition, by double-dating the work 39-41 Mondrian suggests that they were significant enough to consider it incomplete until he applied these final touches in 1941.
Composition with Red and Blue also holds the prestigious distinction of being one of the first pictures that Mondrian sold on his arrival in America. It was acquired in May 1941 by a young architect named Armand P. Bartos, who had been introduced to the artist by the dealer Sidney Janis. Bartos and his wife Celeste would go on to assemble an impressive collection of modern and contemporary art over the following four decades, which included Francis Picabia’s early masterpiece Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), Joan Miró’s Le Port of 1945, Fernand Léger’s Etude pour la ville from 1919, another Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow from 1930 (Joosten, no. B219), and Mark Rothko’s Untitled, 1957.
Mondrian was 66 years old when Hitler’s forces marched through the streets of Vienna in the spring of 1938. The previous year, the artist’s work had been included in the now infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) show in Munich, the culmination of an ambitious propaganda campaign by the Nazis to vilify, censure and confiscate any artworks they considered inconsistent with their ideology, most notably those of the modernist avant-garde. On the walls of this controversial exhibition, paintings by Max Beckmann, Franz Marc and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner were hung alongside masterpieces by Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall, while derisive graffiti, proclaiming “Madness will be the Method” and “Crazy at any Price,” was scattered throughout the display. Mondrian, who was represented by at least two paintings in the exhibition, was profoundly shaken by the event. As talk of war accelerated over the ensuing months, compounded by news of the Anschluss in March, he made plans to leave his beloved Paris. The artist had initially hoped to sail straight for America, but insufficient funds forced him to alter his course, and he was persuaded to travel to London instead.
Mondrian had been drawn to the city in part by his friendships with a number of British painters and artists, several of whom he had met in Paris during the course of the 1930s, such as Winifred Nicholson. Less than a week after his arrival, Mondrian moved into a small one-bedroom apartment at 60 Parkhill Road in Hampstead, not far from his fellow artists Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. As he had in Paris, the artist swiftly set about redesigning his surroundings to best suit his artistic practice, painting the entire space a brilliant, dazzling white, including the smattering of furniture dotted around the rooms. On the walls he then hung rectangular pieces of primary-colored cardboard at regular intervals, which he could move and shift at will—“Within a week, Piet Mondrian had turned it into his Montparnasse studio,” recalled Hepworth (quoted in J.M. Joosten, op. cit., 1998, vol. II, p. 170). After just a month, Mondrian happily reported to his brother Carel that he had achieved “the most important thing, I’m getting on with my work much better here. I can see that it is greatly influenced by these new surroundings” (ibid.).
It was in this positive state of mind that Mondrian embarked upon Composition with Red and Blue in December 1938, showcasing the refined elegance and visual richness of his Neo-Plastic vocabulary. For almost two decades, he had diligently explored the formal possibilities of this revolutionary language of abstraction, as he sought to create an idealized pictorial form of pure equilibrium that would reintegrate a fundamental sense of beauty, order and balance to everyday life. “What do I want to express in my work?” Mondrian wrote. “Nothing other than what every artist seeks: to express harmony through the equivalence of relationships of lines, colors and planes. But only in the clearest and strongest way” (quoted in H. Holtzman and M.S. James, eds., The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, London, 1986, p. 282).
Working with extreme rigor and exactness, the deceptive simplicity of the interplay of elements within the composition—straight lines, pure color, and a bright white ground—belies the hours of deliberation, revision and reflection that marked Mondrian’s approach to painting. He would continually make minute changes to the various elements, adjusting the arrangement of a form, shifting the position and thickness of his lines, reducing or enhancing the strength of a color, before he was satisfied that he had reached a level of clarity and balance within his work. The British art critic Herbert Read recalled, “I once noticed, through a period of two or three visits that he always engaged in painting the black lines of the same picture, and I asked him whether it was a question of the exact width of the line. He answered No; it was the intensity, which could only be achieved by repeated applications of paint” (quoted in J. Milner, Mondrian, London, 1992, p. 202).
By July 1939, Mondrian was sufficiently happy with the picture to include Composition with Red and Blue, along with two other new pictures in an exhibition at Galerie Charpentier in Paris, entitled Réalités Nouvelles. Co-organized by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, this was among the most comprehensive exhibitions of abstract art organized in France in the years immediately preceding the war, and took its name from a quote by Guillaume Apollinaire. Here, the present work hung beside Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: Nom III (1938, Joosten, no. B284; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), as well as the first state of Composition of Red and White: Nom I (1938, Joosten, no. B285/313; Saint Louis Art Museum), while paintings from Wassily Kandinsky and sculptures by Naum Gabo were arranged nearby. Shown together on a single stretch of wall, the trio of paintings by Mondrian not only illustrated the recent developments in his style, but also the richness and potential of the artist’s aesthetic, as the seemingly restricted language of geometric form conjured entirely different visual experiences, depending on the arrangement of the various elements.
Since the early 1930s, Mondrian had leaned towards a greater sense of complexity and rhythm in his compositions—stepping away from the meditative, restrained style of his so called “classical period,” his paintings displayed a bold new tempo, as he increased the number of lines, crossings and segments within his canvases. In 1933, he introduced the use of double lines arranged in close proximity to one another, the space between them carefully analyzed and measured to generate a profound tension. Works such as Composition with Double Line and Yellow and Blue (1933, Joosten, no. B238; The Hilti Art Foundation) represented a subtle yet dramatic breakthrough in the artist’s idiosyncratic vocabulary, ushering in a new spirit and energy to his pictures. By 1938, these black verticals and horizontals had multiplied and pictures like Composition of Red, Blue, Yellow and White: Nom III and Opposition of Lines, Red and Yellow (Joosten, no. B273; The Philadelphia Museum of Art) show Mondrian using them to progressively compartmentalize his canvases into a network of smaller, sub-rectangles and squares.
In Composition with Red and Blue, Mondrian draws the viewer’s eye towards a series of successive horizontal lines concentrated in the upper portion of the canvas, executed in meticulously applied layers of deep black pigment, their bold forms contrasting with the simplicity of the adjoining planes of pure white. In Composition with Red and Black from 1936 (Joosten, no. B269; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) a similar pattern of three closely aligned horizontal lines is inverted, arranged in the lower right corner of the picture to create a ladder-like effect which suggests upwards movement. In contrast, there is a distinct solidity to their placement and presence within the present canvas, generating a vivid sense of structure. The space between these rhythmic lines are not precisely equal either, differing slightly from one segment to the next. Driven by intuition rather than any mathematical formula or preconceived plan, Mondrian sought to temper and “orchestrate” the effects of his lines through such subtle adjustments and revisions as he worked. The diagonal placement of the red and blue color planes in Composition with Red and Blue, meanwhile, at the very corners of the painting, brings a further sense of equilibrium to the picture, creating a dynamic energy that seems to push our focus inwards towards the center of the canvas.
Mondrian remained in London for two years, and though he began several new compositions, he completed only two pictures during this time. By 1940 he had almost ceased painting altogether—the fall of Paris to the Germans, followed by the nightly air raids during the Blitz left his nerves in shreds. The bombing of a building near his home proved the final straw for Mondrian, and in September he boarded a ship bound for America. His unfinished pictures and painting equipment followed him across the ocean, arriving three months later in Manhattan. Tucked among the crates of canvases was Composition with Red and Blue, which joined the other “transatlantic pictures” in the artist’s new studio on First Avenue, propped against the walls as they waited for him to return to them. Mondrian had been immediately dazzled by New York, with its breathless dynamism and modernity, its grid-like street plan and vertiginous skyscrapers, and extraordinary mixture of cultures, music and art. Above all, Mondrian felt at home among the throng of European artists who had sought refuge there during the Second World War, many of whom attended the soirees and salons of the flamboyant collector Peggy Guggenheim. Here, Mondrian renewed his friendships with André Breton, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp. He also became acquainted with a new generation of young American artists through Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
Life in the busy metropolis reinvigorated Mondrian, and he returned to his unfinished and in-progress canvases with a renewed vitality. The following three years would constitute one of the most exciting and adventurous periods of his career, as he sought to convey a vivid impression of his new surroundings within his abstract paintings. “He was terrifically impressed with the dynamism he found in New York and wanted to make his paintings dynamic,” recalled his close friend Charmion von Wiegand, in an interview with Margit Rowell. “They were too classically balanced once he looked at them through American eyes. But rather than start a new painting with a new idea, he tried out his new ideas on old paintings” (“Interview with Charmion von Wiegand, by Margit Rowell, 20 June 1971,” in exh. cat., op. cit., 1971, p. 80). This new-found vigor would lead Mondrian to complete over 25 pictures in an astonishing burst of creativity, including Composition with Red and Blue. Though it is difficult to pinpoint the exact alterations the artist executed after he returned to the composition following the 1939 exhibition, by double-dating the work 39-41 Mondrian suggests that they were significant enough to consider it incomplete until he applied these final touches in 1941.
Composition with Red and Blue also holds the prestigious distinction of being one of the first pictures that Mondrian sold on his arrival in America. It was acquired in May 1941 by a young architect named Armand P. Bartos, who had been introduced to the artist by the dealer Sidney Janis. Bartos and his wife Celeste would go on to assemble an impressive collection of modern and contemporary art over the following four decades, which included Francis Picabia’s early masterpiece Edtaonisl (Ecclesiastic), Joan Miró’s Le Port of 1945, Fernand Léger’s Etude pour la ville from 1919, another Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow from 1930 (Joosten, no. B219), and Mark Rothko’s Untitled, 1957.