This past fall I had the opportunity to see several early Piet Mondrian paintings in the Gemente Museum (The Hague, The Netherlands). Although he is most famous for his later simplified Neoplastic art such as Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red, 1937-42 (on the left), I prefer his earlier works that have a concrete subject and yet contain a graph like pattern to them.
Although His earliest landscapes are a type of subdued Fauvism, they are nice. I like Oostzijdse Mill in Moonlight 1894-1907 (below) in particular because although it is very dark, it is simple with subtle shifts in tone and color. The lines are not perfect and it has a shifting appearance suggestive of the presence of a darkened setting.
There are a few pieces that represent a shift in his work, and they link his earlier style with his later well-known paintings. One that I particularly found myself drawn to is entitled Mill in the Evening 1917 (below). This is another night picture, and has the dark subtle hues of the earlier stated landscape while simultaneously introducing the viewer of the painting to a reduction of nature into basic shapes. I am fascinated by the way in which he breaks the cloudy sky into a grid. The implied grid lines are light and it is the reverse of his later famous black lined “grid” paintings. This work gives insight into how this gradual transition from the natural to abstract took place.
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