"Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow" (1930) is Mondrian's picture of balance. A large red rectangle, patches of blue and yellow, white space and black bars hold one another in equilibrium, and he believed that equilibrium was the hidden order under everything. The canvas is 45 centimeters (about 17.7 inches) square and hangs in the Kunsthaus, the art museum of Zurich.
To paint balance, he took away everything else. There is no tree, no face, no horizon, only straight black lines, three primary colors and white. Mondrian called this way of painting Neo-Plasticism, and it was the end of a road that had started with Dutch landscapes.
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Balance, in his own writing, meant the end of the personal. In 1926 he described an equilibrium that, in his words, "annihilates individuals as particular personalities." A picture built on that idea should belong to nobody.
Yet the back of this canvas is addressed to someone. Mondrian wrote a dedication there in French, to a friend and colleague, and dated it: Paris, 30 January 1930.
I don't think the dedication cancels that idea. The sentence on the back is about balance "in art and in life," the same claim the front makes. But it does make the picture harder to treat as a diagram, because a person asked for it and Mondrian signed it for that person.
Where did the trees go?
They dissolved into lines and flat color, step by step. The Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, in the notes to its Mondrian and De Stijl exhibition, describes Piet Mondrian starting out in 1892 as an old-fashioned Dutch landscape painter, and spending almost twenty years building his skills.
Then came the trees. In "Gray Tree," painted in 1911 and now in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the museum of The Hague, the trunk and branches spread inside a loose oval and the foreground runs into the background. It shows Mondrian beginning to experiment with Cubism, the style that breaks objects into flat, overlapping pieces.
A year later, in "Apple Tree in Flower," the same subject is more faceted and more abstract. In 1912 he moved to Paris, the city of the Cubists. His tree studies from there still look a little like trees, but geometric shapes and interlocking planes are taking over.
By 1914 he could say what he was doing. In a letter to a correspondent, H. P. Bremmer, he wrote that he now built lines and color combinations on a flat surface "in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness."
He had first believed beauty was hidden inside the painting, and by 1914 he concluded that it lay on the surface, in the structure of color and line. His search for an order under the visible world had begun with a book.
What You'll Discover
The book he said taught him everything.
What the rules of his movement allowed and banned.
Where the black lines meet.
Who the friend was.