Composition with Color Planes 5
Piet Mondrian, 1917
Pink. That's the first problem. You think you know Mondrian. Red. Yellow. Blue. Thick black lines. This one has pink. No black. Not even a proper grid. It's 1917. The Mondrian in your head hasn't been invented yet. He's living in Laren, a village in Holland. Nearby is another painter named Bart van der Leck. Van der Leck had worked in stained glass. So he already knew what color looked like when it didn't have to pretend to be skin or sky or a vase. Red could just be red. Yellow could just be yellow. Mondrian's own paintings were doing something else. The trees and oceans were disappearing. You had to work harder and harder to find what the painting had started as. Each man sees the part he doesn't have. So they start stealing from each other. Mondrian takes the color. Van der Leck takes the nerve to let the subject disappear. Fair trade. And for a minute, they meet right here. Composition with Color Planes 5. One big mustard-yellow block in the middle. Pink and gray around it. The white isn't background. It cuts in between the colors. And nobody has built the black fence yet. That same year, they help start a magazine. De Stijl. "The Style." Not "A Style." "The." That is a lot of confidence for a group still deciding whether pink stays. The next year, there's a manifesto to sign. Mondrian signs it. Van der Leck doesn't. He helped invent "The Style." He just didn't agree with the rules. Van der Leck eventually lets recognizable things back in. Trees. Flowers. A man on a horse. Mondrian goes the other way. He keeps getting stricter. The black grid arrives. The pink goes.
More from Frank
- From the Viaduct, 125th Street, New York — Paul Strand, 1916
- The Moroccans — Henri Matisse, 1916
- Fountain — Marcel Duchamp, 1917
- White on White — Kazimir Malevich, 1918
- Endless Column, Version I — Constantin Brancusi, 1918
- The City — Fernand Léger, 1919