Mondrian – Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow

Is this art? Or is it just a colour swatch for a nightmare living room?

And have you noticed that the short horizontal line near the bottom right doesn’t touch the edge. No, it’s not a mistake, it’s not unfinished, he did it on purpose: the scoundrel. He did it to give us an imperceptible unease, a tiny tiny nod to the imperfections of the real world – a world that he has now abstracted into its constituents.

On the surface it’s merely a large red square, a much smaller blue rectangle, and even smaller yellow rectangle. There are black lines, two of the black lines are thicker than the others. There’s white rectangles as well, providing a kind of background, or foreground, or midground. It’s not clear.

Peit Mondrian was a Dutch painter. His earlier works are nice; acceptable. He painted pretty night scenes, tranquil and moody. He did botanical paintings of real things; things you could point to and recognise.

He became interested in Picasso’s work and Braque’s work: the cubists. He started down the path to abstraction. And just kept going.

What is this a painting of? An artist’s trick is to turn a painting upside down to see it differently. Do that, and it’s almost a landscape, red at the bottom, blue up the top, the sun coming in from the top left, maybe a cloud. But put it the right way up again (Mondrian made sure we would do this by putting his initials in prominently), and you realise the yellow rectangle can’t be the sun, because it’s at the bottom; same for the sky. In fact the entire composition is vertical and horizontal, giving us no perspective lines, no diagonals to draw our eyes in, no sense of space. And yet solid at the same time. Constructed. Kind of real. Grounded.

Is Composition II and its siblings, the end of the line for abstractionism? Is it the logical endpoint after you abstract, and abstract and abstract. Is it the ultimate abstraction of represented reality?

Looking at those colours we are reminded that the three primary colours that painters use to create all images are red, blue and yellow. These three colours, together with black and white, can, mixed and arranged into various shapes, create everything and every colour in every painting you have ever seen in your life.

Has Mondrian deconstructed all art? He has given us the absolute stripped bare necessities to describe and represent the world. It’s just that he hasn’t created that description for you. It’s left to you to impose, or imagine, what you think it means.

As you ponder Composition II, you might find yourself thinking: “I could have done that”. But as artist David Hockney pointed out: “yes, but you didn’t”. And is the standard of art – that makes it great art – how difficult it is to achieve? Are we to only reward with our attention the epic convoluted masterpieces of a certain era because they look real.

You can look at a painting like Composition II and walk on by, wondering what on earth is going on. What was he thinking? But that’s the wrong question. The question is: what are you thinking?