Main content
Modernisms 1900-1980
Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 3
Lesson 7: De Stijl- De Stijl, Part I: Total Purity
- De Stijl, Part II: Near-Abstraction and Pure Abstraction
- De Stijl, Part III: The Total De Stijl Environment
- Mondrian, Composition No. II, with Red and Blue
- "Composition in Brown and Gray," Piet Mondrian
- Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow
© 2023 Khan AcademyTerms of usePrivacy PolicyCookie Notice
Mondrian, Composition No. II, with Red and Blue
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. II, with Red and Blue, oil on canvas, 1929 (original date partly obliterated; mistakenly repainted 1925 by Mondrian). Oil on canvas, 15 7/8 x 12 5/8" (40.3 x 32.1 cm) (The Museum of Modern Art) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris, Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- How is this a tough painting? It's a bunch of rectangles within a rectangle- something I could have done as a little kid! Am I missing something?(2 votes)
- "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
-Picasso(46 votes)
- Does one have to hold a doctorate to see all these things in a simplistic design? I see nothing of what they were talking about.(3 votes)
- I don't get it either. This is by far the hardest section in the art playlist. I have no idea what the artist was going for, either in design or composition. It makes very little sense to me as a whole. I'm going to continue to try to understand this style of art, but It's quite difficult.(2 votes)
- I've always wondered how one would figure out "which end is up" in a Mondrian painting such as this. If you had, say, a postcard of this (or many many other Mondrians), and turned it upside down or 90 degrees to the right or left, by what rules could you determine the correct orientation the artist meant for it to be viewed at? And would the orientation change anything about the artist's "meaning" or "intent"?(4 votes)
- My reading of this particular painting is that the current orientation gives the red and blue shapes, which carry more weight in the painting, a sense that they are suspended within the frame of the black lines. There is interestingly only one line running along the edge of the canvas and this looks like it was placed at the bottom to act as a foot grounding the abstracted painting.(2 votes)
- what is Mondrian trying to say with this panting ? or did he even imbue this panting with feelings? when i look at it i think of politics but what do i know.(2 votes)
- That's a very interesting concept. I would've never thought that this could relate to politics.(2 votes)
- Didn't Mondrian make many paintings In this style, if so why did he make so many and not stop with one or two?(1 vote)
- His works were experiments in composition. One or two wouldn't be enough to fully explore what he wanted to do.(3 votes)
- Okay, please do not hate me for mentioning this level of pop culture....BUT, I think in the Katy Perry video "This is how we do" she dresses up in front of a Piet Mondrian painting or at least it sure looks like it! Can anyone confirm this...if you dare?
The youtube link is here and the scene I am referring to is atin the video....thanks! 1:44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RMQksXpQSk(2 votes)- Thanks for that connection. I watched, I saw, I appreciated.(1 vote)
- How was Mondrian able to get the colors so flat and even? I know in the video atthey say that you can see the brush strokes, but through the camera the canvas looks remarkably flat and even. Does anyone know how he achieved this? 3:07(1 vote)
- Here's an excellent and very accessible article which speaks directly to your question.
http://www.snap-dragon.com/PMMandT.html(1 vote)
- @this is a system that he called neoplasticism and not neoclassicism 2:36(1 vote)
- This look remarkably easy, but I know it's hard to make lines that straight.(1 vote)
- Although I thoroughly enjoyed the interpretation and understand what was said, I still see a red roof on top of a white house to the left with the black lines running off the canvass to indicate more to build and a blue bridge to the right that connects to the openess of what will come next. Does anyone see that also?(1 vote)
Video transcript
(piano playing) Dr. Beth Harris: Here we are at the Museum of Modern
Art and we're looking at Mondrian's Composition
No. II with Red and Blue and the date is 1929. Dr. Steven Zucker: Even now
the canvas actually says 1925 with a little initial
by the artist incorrectly. Beth: Well, you know,
artists do that sometimes. They make mistakes. Steven: They do and
that especially happens when artists go back later and try to date paintings that they had done earlier. We're looking at a really tough painting. I mean, here's a painting that, and the title certainly
is a perfect reference. This is rectilinear form. It's this rectangle
that has white and blue and red and black and that's it. This is a kind of
incredible, pure abstraction. Beth: And it's a wild
thing to see after walking in from the previous
room, which has Monet's Waterlilies and paintings
by Vuillard and Bonnard ... Steven: Which is all naturalistic. this right, figurative, western tradition and then you walk in here
and it's in modernism. Steven: It's so austere. It is modernism and it's seemingly ... Beth: And the white walls of the gallery look different. Everything
looks different. Steven: Even the frames are
incredibly spare. Incredible. Beth: I don't know that
they're even framed, in a way. Steven: Yeah, they're almost platform. How does a viewer get
access to the meaning of a painting like this? I mean, can you just
look at it and sort of feel a certain way about it? Is that enough or is this something that we really, sort of, want to pull apart in an artist-orical matter? Beth: I think probably both. I mean, I think the
presence of the earlier Mondrian's in the gallery, the ones that look more like analytic
cubism shed some light on Mondrian's use of a grid here. Steven: Yeah, because in fact, Mondrian did start out replicating nature in a much more direct way. Sometimes with wild symbolist color, but it actually does help when you look at these, sort of, grids
that Mondrian ends up with to understand that he
began by really looking at analytic cubism and
looking at the relation of the way an object falls over a ground and a way in which the
ground between forms actually becomes evermore
present, evermore powerful. There are those fabulous images. Beth: Trees? Steven: Yeah, exactly. Beth: The trees, yeah. Steven: The flowering
apple trees, for instance, where the sky between the bows takes on a kind of physicality
and a kind of presence that is actually overwhelming
of the branches themselves. Beth: I think that began with Picasso with Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, when the space between the figures is, and maybe even with Sezand is just this palpable as the volumes themselves. Steven: So the conversation is really not with the apple tree ultimately, but with what's happening in the canvas. This sort of, very formal discussion. So, this is a system that he
called neoclassicism, right? And we have this incredibly
reduced kind of pallet, obviously, pure. Beth: Primary colors. Steven: Right and black and white. Although if you look at
the bottom right corner, the white, the rectangle is ... Beth: It looks a little grey. Steven: It's a little off-grey and I don't know if that's original, if that's intentional, but
Mondrian was very careful. You know what's interesting is actually when you're up close
looking at this canvas it's very much like the Malevich. It's actually got the human touch to it. He's not obliterating his brush strokes. Beth: No, you can see the brush strokes. It's not painterly. Steven: No, but within the very, sort of, simplified format of the
canvas it does actually seem like it's got a
bit of factor to where it is kind of painterly,
even in this context where as in a dellaquila, of course, this would not be. You know it's ... Beth: It's not an Andy Warhol print. Steven: No, it's a made thing. Beth: So, why choose the primary colors? Why is he using black? Steven: I think it's about purity. I think he's trying to get to an elemental kind of purity and a kind of
elemental balance as well. I mean, when I see this, I see that blue in some ways, held in place, and the red held in place by those black bars almost as if it's the grid
of a stained glass window, but at the same time, I see other things, much more complex things begin to happen where the blue pushes
forward, the red can, in a sense, see back
into a rather deep space. I think that there's an incredible kind of play of harmony that exists, not only as a left right balance,
but as a vertical balance and perhaps even a balance
that has to do with what moves towards us
and what, in a sense, creates the illusion of space. Beth: Moving back. Black
usually recedes, doesn't it? Steven: It does, but in
this case it can recede, but it can also be a
kind of forward armature in which those planes of color are placed. Except that those planes refuse, also, to be planes. Beth: In what way? Steven: Well, I can see that red as having real volume, having the kind of volume that goes back in space,
which is interesting because in Matisse's case,
red often pushes forward. Here, it can exist forward,
but it could also have, it has a kind of wonderful ambiguity and a kind of plasticity
visually, so that I think it can really move back. Beth: So, let me ask you. Why is Mondrian so interested in purity
at this moment in 1925 or '29, so interested in balance, so interested in reducing things to their basic elements. Steven: Well, think about what's going on in the world in the '20's. Europe had just ... Here
we have a Dutch artist. He's just come out of the first world war. Europe had been devastated. Steven: And I think that
there was this incredibly Utopian notion that art
could have a kind of agency that could help to actually create harmony in the world. Beth: To, sort of, rebuild the future in a better way. Steven: It's really Utopian. That is, if we can construct
balance and harmony in our surroundings, in our architecture and our painting, in our
visual and physical world ... Beth: Environment. Steven: Then perhaps we
can have that harmony in politics and in life throughout. Beth: I guess that vision makes sense, but it's so hard to recapture. I feel like we're so jaded now. Steven: We are. There
was a kind of heroism. A sense of possibility. Beth: And that artists could be part of that transformation,
now seems a little bit misplaced in a way. Steven: It's an extraordinary hopefulness and it's extraordinarily
ironic considering that this man lived through, not only the first but ultimately the second
world war in part as well. Beth: Yeah. (piano playing)