Study for a Composition

In 1916, after a long search for an entirely new visual vocabulary to represent the physical world, Piet Mondrian arrived at a fully abstract style. He reduced bridges, churches, rivers, trees, and more to a series of horizontal and vertical black lines enclosing fields of unmixed red, blue, and yellow as well as white, black, and gray. This artistic idiom, eventually called Neoplasticism, removed naturalism from painting to reveal the essence of visual forms and provide viewers with a transcendental experience. While Mondrian’s abstractions may seem simple, he worked hard to achieve the dynamic yet harmonious balance between line and color. He labored over the location, spacing, and thickness of every line, making numerous charcoal sketches both on paper and ...