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拍品專文
Painted in 1922, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue encapsulates the purity, elegance and extreme rigor of Piet Mondrian’s revolutionary mature aesthetic. It was during the early 1920s, while living in Paris, that Mondrian solidified and explored fully the potential of Neo-Plasticism, the ground-breaking approach to abstraction he had pioneered towards the end of the First World War. Using only the fundamental elements of painting—the straight line, primary colors and the three non-colors of black, white and gray—Mondrian believed that he could create an idealized pictorial form of pure equilibrium that would reintegrate a fundamental sense of beauty into life. “The task today, then, is to create a direct expression of beauty—clear and as far as possible ‘universal’,” Mondrian wrote. “It will be a purely plastic beauty, that is, beauty expressed exclusively through lines, planes or volumes and through color—a beauty without natural form and without representation. It is purely abstract art” (“Purely Abstract Art”; reproduced in H. Holtzman and M.S. James, The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, London, 1986, p. 199).
When he left the Netherlands for Paris in June 1919, Mondrian was still using a modular grid and gradated color as the basis of his work. During his first year in France, however, his art underwent a radical transformation—restricting himself to purely abstract rules of geometry and color, he began to use a refined visual language of squares or rectangles of primary hues, set in white fields and bounded by intersecting straight lines. Intended to evoke principles of balance and harmony, these works marked a key breakthrough in his pursuit of “a true vision of reality,” and by the end of 1920, Mondrian had painted his first genuinely Neo-Plastic composition. Over the course of the subsequent two years, he executed more than thirty paintings using this radically reduced pictorial vocabulary—approximately one-fifth of his total Neo-Plastic output—testing and exploring its limits. However, Mondrian was surprised to find his bold new idiom stood in stark contrast to the prevailing trends of the rappel à l’ordre then sweeping through the European art world, which favored a return to figuration and classical ideals. Nevertheless, he remained unswerving in his devotion to the theories of Neo-Plasticism, relentlessly pursuing and promoting its potential as a thoroughly modern pictorial language to fellow artists, collectors and gallerists. As a result, he attracted attention from several key figures in the Parisian art world, most notably the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, who published Mondrian’s text Neo-Plasticism in French translation in January 1921, and included several of his recent paintings in a well-attended group exhibition three months later.
Mondrian completely immersed himself in his art during this pivotal period, working intensively and using the core concepts of Neo-Plasticism within the arrangement and form of his own living space. In his apartment and studio at 26 rue du Départ, where he moved in October 1921, he covered the white walls with primary colored, geometric cardboard shapes, arranged, like in his paintings, according to his carefully worked-out Neo-Plastic principles. He painted all the objects in the studio, including the few pieces of furniture he had and his treasured gramophone player, in bright primary hues, so as to create what he described as “a new design for living.” Entering from the dark hallway, the bright, immaculately ordered space astonished visitors—Alexander Calder, recalling his pivotal first visit to the studio, wrote of the impact this experience had on his creative imagination: “It was a very exciting room… I suggested to Mondrian that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate. And he, with a very serious countenance, said: ‘No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast.’ …This one visit gave me a shock that started things. Though I had often heard the word ‘modern’ before, I did not consciously know or feel the term ‘abstract.’ So now, at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract” (Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York, 1966, p. 113).
Another visitor to the rue du Départ was the artist, critic and author of one of the first monographs on Mondrian, Michel Seuphor, who wrote a detailed account of how the artist used the space. “The room was quite large, very bright, with a very high ceiling,” Seuphor recounted. “Mondrian had divided it irregularly, utilizing for this purpose a large black-painted cupboard, which was partly hidden by an easel long out of service; the latter was covered with big gray and white pasteboards. Another easel rested against the large rear wall whose appearance changed often, for Mondrian applied to it his Neo-Plastic virtuosity. The second easel was completely white, and used only for showing finished canvases. The actual work was done on the table. It stood in front of the large window facing the rue du Départ, and was covered with a canvas waxed white and nailed to the underside of the boards. I often surprised Mondrian there, armed with a ruler and ribbons of transparent paper, which he used for measuring. I never saw him with any other working tool…” (Piet Mondrian: Life and Work, New York, 1955, pp. 158-160).
It was here, in the midst of this carefully designed and restrained studio space, that Mondrian began work on Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue in 1922. By this time, Mondrian had defined the essential elements of his Neo-Plastic visual idiom, and spent much of that year working to further refine his ideas. Using primarily square format canvases, he experimented and played with the internal dynamics of his compositions, adjusting the arrangement of the grid, the thickness of his dividing lines, the saturation of color and the placement of various elements within the boundaries of the canvas. Filled with a dynamic internal energy, in which each line, each plane, each color is brought to life by its relationship to the other elements within the painting, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue proves just how dynamic Mondrian’s restrained artistic language could be. As John Milner explained: “all that changes [in Mondrian’s work] is the number of elements, the proportions of the parts, and the rhythm they establish. This was enough for Mondrian. Here were the fundamentals of his paintings. Their relationships stood for all that existed, and he could see in those infinite relationships the visual evidence of his view of the world, his own cosmology” (Mondrian, London, 1992, p. 163).
Despite their apparent simplicity, works such as Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue are based on a complex system of balance and imbalance, symmetry and asymmetry, that the artist arrived at intuitively, through careful and prolonged contemplation before his works. The principle focus of the canvas is the vibrant red square, which is the largest and most prominent form within the composition, positioned just slightly off-center. The surrounding planes are executed in subtly different tones of white and gray, while pops of yellow, black and vibrant blue, are arranged towards the edges of the canvas. The black lines dividing these planes of color vary slightly in width, lending a subtle sense of depth and dynamism to the grid, with the thicker lines granted a greater power and solidity within the composition than their counterparts. Having said this, unlike other compositions from this period where these black lines appear to continue infinitely beyond the space of the canvas, in Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue they appear to taper off towards the edge in places, allowing the bright primary colors they border to interact directly with their neighboring planes of white or gray. This is most noticeable in the upper right corner of the composition, where tiny slivers of soft yellow pigment float freely into the adjoining spaces, creating an unexpected impression of delicate layering and three-dimensionality within the canvas.
Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue was acquired directly from Mondrian in the year it was painted by the poet, and founding member of De Stijl, Antony Kok. An innovative writer with an interest in new modes of expression, most notably experimental klankpoëzie or sound poetry, Kok was quickly absorbed into the circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals around Theo van Doesburg, following their meeting in 1914. Kok came to play an important role in the establishment of the group’s periodical, De Stijl, contributing numerous articles and poems on the subject of modern life and art to the magazine. During these years he also became close to Mondrian, and he remained an important comrade and confidante for the artist through the early 1920s following his return to Paris. Writing to Van Doesburg in April 1922, Mondrian detailed a recent visit from the poet, during which he had purchased a painting from him—“I spent some particularly pleasant days with Kok,” he wrote “…it cheered me up to meet a kindred spirit once again at last. He has a clear vision…” (quoted in J.M. Joosten, op. cit., 1998, p. 305).
Further correspondence from later that year reveals that Mondrian was in fact working on two separate pictures for Kok at this time—Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Blue-White (Joosten, no. B143; The Menil Collection, Houston), and the present work, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue. According to a letter dated August 1922, one of Kok’s works was finished quite quickly, but the artist was still pondering over the second painting, which he continued to do to the end of the year. The two works appear to have been delivered to Kok the following spring, and remained with him until the early 1950s, at which point Nelly van Doesburg acted as a broker for the poet during one of her visits to New York. She sold a total of four paintings by Mondrian from Kok’s collection to a series of important American buyers, including John Streep, John L. Senior Jr. and Jean and Dominique de Menil. Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue was sold to Henri-Georges Doll at this time, and is the last of this quartet of paintings formerly in Kok’s collection to remain in private hands.
When he left the Netherlands for Paris in June 1919, Mondrian was still using a modular grid and gradated color as the basis of his work. During his first year in France, however, his art underwent a radical transformation—restricting himself to purely abstract rules of geometry and color, he began to use a refined visual language of squares or rectangles of primary hues, set in white fields and bounded by intersecting straight lines. Intended to evoke principles of balance and harmony, these works marked a key breakthrough in his pursuit of “a true vision of reality,” and by the end of 1920, Mondrian had painted his first genuinely Neo-Plastic composition. Over the course of the subsequent two years, he executed more than thirty paintings using this radically reduced pictorial vocabulary—approximately one-fifth of his total Neo-Plastic output—testing and exploring its limits. However, Mondrian was surprised to find his bold new idiom stood in stark contrast to the prevailing trends of the rappel à l’ordre then sweeping through the European art world, which favored a return to figuration and classical ideals. Nevertheless, he remained unswerving in his devotion to the theories of Neo-Plasticism, relentlessly pursuing and promoting its potential as a thoroughly modern pictorial language to fellow artists, collectors and gallerists. As a result, he attracted attention from several key figures in the Parisian art world, most notably the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, who published Mondrian’s text Neo-Plasticism in French translation in January 1921, and included several of his recent paintings in a well-attended group exhibition three months later.
Mondrian completely immersed himself in his art during this pivotal period, working intensively and using the core concepts of Neo-Plasticism within the arrangement and form of his own living space. In his apartment and studio at 26 rue du Départ, where he moved in October 1921, he covered the white walls with primary colored, geometric cardboard shapes, arranged, like in his paintings, according to his carefully worked-out Neo-Plastic principles. He painted all the objects in the studio, including the few pieces of furniture he had and his treasured gramophone player, in bright primary hues, so as to create what he described as “a new design for living.” Entering from the dark hallway, the bright, immaculately ordered space astonished visitors—Alexander Calder, recalling his pivotal first visit to the studio, wrote of the impact this experience had on his creative imagination: “It was a very exciting room… I suggested to Mondrian that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate. And he, with a very serious countenance, said: ‘No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast.’ …This one visit gave me a shock that started things. Though I had often heard the word ‘modern’ before, I did not consciously know or feel the term ‘abstract.’ So now, at thirty-two, I wanted to paint and work in the abstract” (Calder: An Autobiography with Pictures, New York, 1966, p. 113).
Another visitor to the rue du Départ was the artist, critic and author of one of the first monographs on Mondrian, Michel Seuphor, who wrote a detailed account of how the artist used the space. “The room was quite large, very bright, with a very high ceiling,” Seuphor recounted. “Mondrian had divided it irregularly, utilizing for this purpose a large black-painted cupboard, which was partly hidden by an easel long out of service; the latter was covered with big gray and white pasteboards. Another easel rested against the large rear wall whose appearance changed often, for Mondrian applied to it his Neo-Plastic virtuosity. The second easel was completely white, and used only for showing finished canvases. The actual work was done on the table. It stood in front of the large window facing the rue du Départ, and was covered with a canvas waxed white and nailed to the underside of the boards. I often surprised Mondrian there, armed with a ruler and ribbons of transparent paper, which he used for measuring. I never saw him with any other working tool…” (Piet Mondrian: Life and Work, New York, 1955, pp. 158-160).
It was here, in the midst of this carefully designed and restrained studio space, that Mondrian began work on Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue in 1922. By this time, Mondrian had defined the essential elements of his Neo-Plastic visual idiom, and spent much of that year working to further refine his ideas. Using primarily square format canvases, he experimented and played with the internal dynamics of his compositions, adjusting the arrangement of the grid, the thickness of his dividing lines, the saturation of color and the placement of various elements within the boundaries of the canvas. Filled with a dynamic internal energy, in which each line, each plane, each color is brought to life by its relationship to the other elements within the painting, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue proves just how dynamic Mondrian’s restrained artistic language could be. As John Milner explained: “all that changes [in Mondrian’s work] is the number of elements, the proportions of the parts, and the rhythm they establish. This was enough for Mondrian. Here were the fundamentals of his paintings. Their relationships stood for all that existed, and he could see in those infinite relationships the visual evidence of his view of the world, his own cosmology” (Mondrian, London, 1992, p. 163).
Despite their apparent simplicity, works such as Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue are based on a complex system of balance and imbalance, symmetry and asymmetry, that the artist arrived at intuitively, through careful and prolonged contemplation before his works. The principle focus of the canvas is the vibrant red square, which is the largest and most prominent form within the composition, positioned just slightly off-center. The surrounding planes are executed in subtly different tones of white and gray, while pops of yellow, black and vibrant blue, are arranged towards the edges of the canvas. The black lines dividing these planes of color vary slightly in width, lending a subtle sense of depth and dynamism to the grid, with the thicker lines granted a greater power and solidity within the composition than their counterparts. Having said this, unlike other compositions from this period where these black lines appear to continue infinitely beyond the space of the canvas, in Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue they appear to taper off towards the edge in places, allowing the bright primary colors they border to interact directly with their neighboring planes of white or gray. This is most noticeable in the upper right corner of the composition, where tiny slivers of soft yellow pigment float freely into the adjoining spaces, creating an unexpected impression of delicate layering and three-dimensionality within the canvas.
Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue was acquired directly from Mondrian in the year it was painted by the poet, and founding member of De Stijl, Antony Kok. An innovative writer with an interest in new modes of expression, most notably experimental klankpoëzie or sound poetry, Kok was quickly absorbed into the circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals around Theo van Doesburg, following their meeting in 1914. Kok came to play an important role in the establishment of the group’s periodical, De Stijl, contributing numerous articles and poems on the subject of modern life and art to the magazine. During these years he also became close to Mondrian, and he remained an important comrade and confidante for the artist through the early 1920s following his return to Paris. Writing to Van Doesburg in April 1922, Mondrian detailed a recent visit from the poet, during which he had purchased a painting from him—“I spent some particularly pleasant days with Kok,” he wrote “…it cheered me up to meet a kindred spirit once again at last. He has a clear vision…” (quoted in J.M. Joosten, op. cit., 1998, p. 305).
Further correspondence from later that year reveals that Mondrian was in fact working on two separate pictures for Kok at this time—Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Blue-White (Joosten, no. B143; The Menil Collection, Houston), and the present work, Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue. According to a letter dated August 1922, one of Kok’s works was finished quite quickly, but the artist was still pondering over the second painting, which he continued to do to the end of the year. The two works appear to have been delivered to Kok the following spring, and remained with him until the early 1950s, at which point Nelly van Doesburg acted as a broker for the poet during one of her visits to New York. She sold a total of four paintings by Mondrian from Kok’s collection to a series of important American buyers, including John Streep, John L. Senior Jr. and Jean and Dominique de Menil. Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue was sold to Henri-Georges Doll at this time, and is the last of this quartet of paintings formerly in Kok’s collection to remain in private hands.