Location📍 Kröller-Müller Museum → Now on display

Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue

After the First World War, Piet Mondrian was thoroughly convinced that an important role was reserved for art in the modern age. With his paintings, he aims to deliberately express a universal harmony through a meticulous balance between lines, colours, and surfaces.

According to his vision, this balance can be actively visualized ‘in the clearest, most powerful way’ with unique expressive means that do not evoke a specific depiction. For that reason, in his work he exclusively uses straight horizontal and vertical lines, the three primary colours—red, yellow, and blue—and the non-colours including white, black, and grey.

In this Composition with red, yellow and blue, Mondrian again purposefully seeks a balance. The large, white area arranged in this canvas successfully creates a point of rest. However, because it is not centrally placed and is carefully surrounded by the three coloured areas, the composition appears anything but static. It is not limited by the physical size of the canvas, whereby the painting seamlessly seems to continue well beyond its boundaries.