Avond (Evening): The Red Tree

Piet Mondrian

Oil on canvas

Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Avond (Evening): The Red Tree is an oil on canvas painting by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian depicting a leafless apple tree whose vivid red branches spread wide across a deep blue background, evoking an evening landscape rendered in boldly non-naturalistic color. Restricted to a stark concordance of red and blue, the work marks Mondrian's decisive revolt against tonalism and his embrace of pure color as an expressive, rather than descriptive, tool. The painting is the first in Mondrian's celebrated Trees series, a body of work that traces his evolution from Post-Impressionist naturalism toward the radical abstraction of Neoplasticism. Its simplified forms, rhythmic brushwork, and flattened pictorial space signal Mondrian's emergence as an independent artistic voice with a style distinctly his own.