Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray

Piet Mondrian, 1921 · Gallery 513 · Floor 5

Mondrian thought paintings like this could help fix society. But...Paris wasn't buying it. Ya know, Actually buying it. It's 1921. His abstract paintings are a tough sell. So he paints flowers, too. Petals. Stems. A rose that looks like a rose. They help pay the bills. Then he goes back to this. Red. Blue. Black. Yellow. Gray. Put "Composition with" in front of that and you've got the title. Like a paint-store receipt. Look at that black block down at the bottom. The huge stretch of gray up on the right. Then the yellow. One little square, squeezed into the corner. Hardly any yellow at all. But your eye still goes there. Nothing matches. Somehow, it holds together. And Mondrian thinks that balance could work outside a painting. In buildings. Furniture. The way people live together. Which is a lot to put on a yellow square. But three years later, Gerrit Rietveld builds the Schröder House in the Netherlands. White walls. Black lines. Red, blue, yellow. It looks like a Mondrian you can walk into. Try that with a rose. Mondrian had been working on his own room, too. White walls. Colored rectangles he could move around. A friend remembered the trip up to his Paris studio. A horrible, shabby stairwell. Then you open the door. Her words: "As you stepped inside, you were in Paradise." He lived like that for fifteen years. He even kept a fake tulip. Painted its leaves white. He painted flowers Paris would buy. Then painted the green off the one he kept.

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