Piet Mondrian

Composition No. VI was painted in Paris, after Mondrian had made drawings of the side walls of houses on which the structures of demolished adjacent buildings could still be read. Such observed structures here become painted pictorial architecture. Horizontals and verticals have been made the common denominator of the internal forms and overall form of the composition.

The Fondation Beyeler has brought together major works from the period of Mondrian’s fully abstract art. Compared with Picture No. I of 1921/1925, Composition with yellow and blue manifests a marked clarification and simplification in the arrangement of its planes of colour, whereby large areas of the picture now remain white. Examining a work of his mature period like this, which is reduced to just a few elements, we can sense Mondrian’s aim to convey the experience of a higher order that transcends the purely formal dimension by means of the subtle relationships between the forms and how they correspond to the surface of the picture as a whole.

The pictorial square, floating at an angle of 45º, radiates a flawless clarity and at the same time conveys something of a sublime, moving secret. Mondrian created ‘lozenge’ paintings regularly from the 1910s onwards. They were important to him initially not least because they allowed him to consign the ‘empty corners’ of Cubist pictures to the wall. In this late painting in the Fondation’s collection, this ‘emptiness’ is now overcome in consummate fashion by invoking the idea that the vertical and horizontal lines can be imagined meeting ‘outside’ the picture. Within Mondrian’s aesthetic system, the fact that only the edges of the canvas are diagonal, and not the lines inside the picture, is crucial. It becomes possible to comprehend the picture in a new way, namely as an object on the wall capable of providing a glimpse of an ultimately infinite harmony.