Composition C

Piet Mondrian

Oil on canvas

Museum of Modern Art

Composition C (1920) is an oil on canvas by the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, executed during the pivotal early phase of his Neoplastic period after he returned to Paris in 1919. The work employs a strict grid of thick black horizontal and vertical lines dividing the canvas into rectangular fields filled with primary colors — red, blue, and green — alongside white and neutral tones, embodying the reductive visual language of De Stijl. Mondrian, a co-founder of the De Stijl movement, radically simplified pictorial elements to express what he understood as a universal spiritual order underlying visible reality. As one of a stylistically related group of compositions from 1919 to 1921 in which he introduced larger rectangles and primary color mixed with grey, Composition C represents a decisive step toward the iconic mature abstraction for which he is best known.