Place de la Concorde

Piet Mondrian

Oil on canvas

Dallas Museum of Art

Place de la Concorde is an oil on canvas painted by Dutch master Piet Mondrian between 1938 and 1943, embodying his fully mature practice of Neoplasticism through a taut grid of black horizontal and vertical lines enclosing asymmetrically distributed blocks of primary color—red, yellow, and blue—set against a white ground. Although its title evokes the celebrated Parisian square, the work offers no naturalistic representation; instead, Mondrian distilled the energy of urban space into pure geometric abstraction. The painting belongs to the celebrated group known as the "transatlantic paintings": works begun in Europe that Mondrian carried with him when he fled Paris in 1938, subsequently reworking them in New York City in response to the dynamism of his new environment—scraping away paint, widening lines, and adding bars of color. A co-founder of the De Stijl movement and the foremost theorist of Neoplasticism, Mondrian signed the canvas with two dates (38/43), a testament to the painting's trans-continental evolution and the radical shift his art underwent in America.