Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red

Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red, oil painting by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian that was begun in 1937–38 and completed in 1941–42. It was acquired by the Tate Gallery in London in 1964.

Mondrian is one of the most important figures in the development of abstract art. He was keen to develop a purely nonrepresentational mode of painting, based on a set of formal terms. Underlying Mondrian’s ambitions for painting was the aim to express a “pure” reality. His style, a component of De Stijl that he called neoplasticism, did not refer to the external, recognizable world. With all imagery removed from the canvas, what are conventionally seen as the key elements of painting—line, form, hue—are mobilized to serve very different ends, namely, the embodiment of “plastic expression.” To achieve this, Mondrian restricted himself to straight lines and basic colours.

In Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red, he organizes the composition around a series of vertical and horizontal lines that overlap to form a grid. Four discrete areas of primary colour are weighted so that colour functions as a form of counterbalance to each line’s ascribed role. Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red is a mature representation of the neoplastic approach.

Mondrian began the piece while he was living in Paris; in 1938, he went to live in London, then moved to New York City two years later, where the painting was completed. In New York, the artist took a further step in his program of formal experimentation, by giving complex colour planes precedence over lines. The significance of this work resides in its ability to take what is fundamental to painting and use it to create a reality entirely in accordance with Mondrian’s quest for plastic expression.