Composition Blue, Red, Yellow, Black

Piet Mondrian

Oil on canvas

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

This painting is a quintessential example of Piet Mondrian's mature Neoplastic style, in which thick black horizontal and vertical lines divide the canvas into rectangular fields filled with the primary colors blue, red, and yellow, set against white and black. Mondrian, born in Amersfoort, Netherlands in 1872, was a co-founder of the De Stijl movement and the principal theorist of Neoplasticism—a philosophy that sought to reduce visual art to its most universal elements: straight lines, right angles, and primary colors. By 1921, working in Paris, he had fully realized this austere visual language, believing that such compositions could express the underlying spiritual harmony of the universe rather than imitate the surface appearance of nature. Works of this type represent the apex of his lifelong drive toward pure abstraction and remain among the most iconic images in the history of modern art.