Composition III (Komposition No.XIII)

On a Sunday afternoon in May 1920, the Dutch journalist Willem Röell paid a visit to Piet Mondrian at his new studio in Paris. A correspondent for the daily newspaper Het Vaderland, Röell was intrigued to meet the revolutionary painter and avant-garde theorist, who had recently returned to the city. Upon entering Mondrian’s modest atelier, Röell was amazed by the stark, minimalist environment the artist had created, where he “grapples with his material in monk-like solitude, in his quest for his lofty, highly controversial idea” (W.F.A. Röell, “A Visit to Piet Mondrian,” 1920; reproduced in F. Manacorda and M. White, eds., Mondrian and his Studios: Colour in Space, exh. cat., Tate Liverpool, 2014, p. 34). Mondrian eagerly showed Röell his latest experimental works, a cluster of new paintings that represented an extraordinary breakthrough. “The paintings with rectangular shapes are the most recent,” Röell wrote. “The formerly scattered horizontal and vertical lines now meet to demarcate rectangles of various sizes and position, filled with strongly contrasting colours… One by one the painter has abandoned the pictorial means...” (ibid., p. 36).

Composition III was most likely among the works the artist unveiled that day, a highly refined and diligently worked composition that he was putting the finishing touches to after months of careful deliberation. Within the bounds of this almost square canvas, a sequence of geometric coloured planes are set within a grid of straight lines, the interplay of abstract forms generating an intriguing visual tension that draws the viewer in and prompts contemplation. This was a powerful statement of intent by Mondrian, reducing his pictorial language to its essential fundamentals of pure colour and line, boldly proclaiming the key elements of the revolutionary, visionary aesthetic he had now reached in his art. “The task today, then, is to create a direct expression of beauty – clear and as far as possible ‘universal’,” Mondrian wrote, explaining his intentions. “It will be a purely plastic beauty, that is… a beauty without natural form and without representation. It is purely abstract art” (“Purely Abstract Art,” 1926; reproduced in H. Holtzman and M.S. James, The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, London, 1986, p. 199).

One of just eight works the artist completed in 1920 – the majority of which are now held in museum collections, including the Tate in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Wilhelm Hack Museum in Ludwigshafen – Composition III is a testament to Mondrian’s daring originality as he took this great leap forward in his art, solidifying the rules of his pioneering abstract language known as Neo-Plasticism for the very first time. It was with these iconic works that Mondrian cemented his legacy within the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde, forging a new style of non-objective painting that would prove to be a crucial catalyst in the development of modern art.

Mondrian had made his much longed for return to Paris almost a year prior to his meeting with Röell, arriving in the French capital in late June 1919. Having found himself stranded unexpectedly in Holland at the outbreak of the First World War, he spent much of the ensuing five years dreaming of the lively artistic scene he had left behind in Paris, making plans to travel back at the earliest opportunity. Nevertheless, the War years proved to be an incredibly fruitful and stimulating period for Mondrian. In Holland, he discovered a group of like-minded artists, architects and thinkers, who shared his belief that a new language of modern art was key to prompting a spiritual renewal that would bring harmony and unity to the world.

Chief among them was the energetic, confident and charismatic polymath Theo van Doesburg, who had first encountered Mondrian’s work at an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in October 1915, and was immediately inspired to write to the artist. This exchange sparked a close, stimulating friendship between the two men that profoundly shaped their artistic outlook over the following decade – never before had Mondrian enjoyed such a sense of intellectual camaraderie with a friend, and the pair challenged and encouraged one another in equal measure as their ideas advanced.

In 1917, Van Doesburg and Mondrian founded the international art journal De Stijl (The Style) as a vehicle for their ideas on art, architecture and culture, giving a name to their bourgeoning group. Though not a formal movement in the traditional sense, De Stijl came to refer to those who congregated around the periodical – from Bart van der Leck and Georges Vantongerloo, to J.J.P. Oud and Vilmos Huszár – drawn together by their shared ambitions and ideals, and belief in the profound possibilities of abstraction. In their mind, visual harmony in art could provide a model for restoring order and balance to everyday life, an urgent and lofty goal in a world torn asunder by war. Keen to share his spiritual philosophy with the world, Mondrian published several essays in the De Stijl journal, each one tracing the crucial evolution of his personal theories and ideas.

At the same time, he began his prolonged quest to translate these concepts into his paintings, further reducing his pictures to an abstract play of colours and geometric shapes, gradually eschewing references to the natural world. These revolutionary ideas were at the very forefront of Mondrian’s mind when he arrived by train into Paris on 22 June 1919, reporting to Van Doesburg that he was happy to be back, where he felt “the seriousness of the big city” (letter to T. van Doesburg, 1 August 1919; quoted in J.M. Joosten, Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné of the Work of 1911-1944, New York, 1998, vol. II, p. 116). Over the course of the ensuing months, Mondrian re-established himself in the city, renewing contacts with fellow members of the avant-garde, visiting exhibitions and galleries, bookstores and art supply shops, and absorbing the energy and rhythms of life in the metropolis.

The Paris Mondrian had left behind before the War was a fervent melting pot of ideas and styles, rife with experimentation and daring artistic innovation, led by the work of the Cubists, the Orphists, and the Futurists. In 1919, however, Mondrian was surprised to find the city’s avant-garde had shifted. Artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Gino Severini, were now favouring a more traditional and classically-influenced approach to form and figuration, taking inspiration from the art of the past, both the Old Masters and the ancient world. Known as the “retour à l'ordre,” this new tendency in painting appeared startlingly conservative to Mondrian, though it was shaped by a similar desire for purity and harmony. In his reports to Van Doesburg about the artistic life of the city, he repeatedly expressed his dismay at this turn, which he felt was no longer in tune with the modern experience. This made Mondrian even more determined to continue his own researches into abstraction, in pursuit of a different, more fundamental sense of the universal. As Hans Janssen has noted, “He realised that the development of the new must proceed. There could be no half measures. He had to see where the work took him” (Piet Mondrian: A Life, London, 2022, p. 55).

While Mondrian had found himself at an impasse in his painting in his final months in Holland, in Paris he was now filled with a fervent urge to work, brimming with new ideas and possibilities. “I’m looking for still something else,” he reported. “I am working now on two things which have more of that something else…” (letter to T. van Doesburg, 21 August 1919; quoted in Joosten, op. cit., 1998, p. 276). The new Plastic art, Mondrian explained, “should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour” (quoted in M. Seuphor, Piet Mondrian: Life and Work, New York, 1956, p. 142).

To this end, he set himself the challenge of focusing on an entirely non-objective pictorial language that adhered to these principles, eschewing the modular grids and soft colour gradations that had previously dominated his work, and instead focusing on the interaction of horizontal and vertical lines combined with planes of the three primary colours – red, blue and yellow – as well as the “non-colours” of white, black and grey. Thus, his painterly aesthetic was radically transformed, as Mondrian finally reached the breakthrough he had been searching for. “Perhaps his leaving for Paris was necessary to give him new possibilities in his work. Refreshing,” Van Doesburg mused (letter to J.J.P. Oud, 24 June 1919; quoted in Joosten, op. cit., 1998, p. 115).

At the same time, Mondrian was working on an essay that he believed would prove essential to establishing Neo-Plasticism in Paris, striking an agreement with Léonce Rosenberg, proprietor of the Galerie L’Effort Moderne, to publish it as a booklet under the gallery’s imprint. Rosenberg had first encountered Mondrian’s painting at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, and was intrigued by the recent developments in his work following his arrival in the city after the War. For the artist, Rosenberg’s gallery was a beacon of modernity within the city, showcasing the most cutting-edge innovation then occurring in the artworld. Titled Le Néo-Plasticisme: Principe général de l’équivalence plastique, and dedicated “Aux hommes futurs” (“To the men of the future”), the short pamphlet was a distillation of Mondrian’s theories and the core principles of his vision up to this point, representing the first time his writings were available in French. The fourteen-page booklet, which Mondrian spent months working on and translating with the help of his close friend Rinus Ritsema van Eck, issued a call-to-arms for avant-garde painters, writers, architects and musicians, to join him in his pursuit of a universal purity.

Infused with a striking sense of optimism as to the possibilities of abstraction, the text explained that “the essential characteristic of the New Plastic in painting… is a composition of rectangular colour planes that expresses the most profound reality. It achieves this by plastic expression of relationships and not by natural appearance… The coloured planes, as much by position and dimension as by the greater value given to colour, plastically express only relationships and not forms. The New Plastic brings its relationships into aesthetic equilibrium and thereby expresses the new harmony” (P. Mondrian, “Neo-Plasticism: The General Principle of Plastic Equivalence,” 1920; reproduced in op. cit., 1986, p. 137). It was these essential concepts that Mondrian brought to powerful, triumphant realisation in his compositions over the course of 1920, finally achieving the fundamental breakthrough he had been searching for.

Each of the eight paintings completed in 1920 display a keen sense of exploration, the canvases filled with subtle details and revisions that suggest Mondrian was working through his ideas as he went along, experimenting and reaching for the precise visual form that he felt best fulfilled these ambitious ideals. “I am searching for the right harmony in the rhythm and the constant proportion – like I wrote in the article. How difficult that is,” he proclaimed during the earliest stages of composing these works (letter to T. van Doesburg, 16 September 1919; quoted in Joosten, op. cit., 1998, p. 116).

From one canvas to the next, the artist proposed new formal relationships, establishing a painterly formula using large rectangles set in close proximity to one another, which he then filled with a restricted range of primary colours. By reducing his formal language to just a handful of elements in this way – geometric planes of pure colour, softly demarcated lines establishing a grid structure – Mondrian believed he could convey such an absolute sense of harmony and reach a pure expression of the fundamental laws that governed the universe.

All of these works boast a complex process of construction, shaped through deep thought and prolonged contemplation, in order to achieve their delicate equilibrium. Though employing a limited range of elements, they are incredibly nuanced works that took months at a time to achieve, as he analysed the intricacy of each painting’s visual dynamics and the interrelationships of their different elements. Mondrian worked concurrently on several canvases through the year, discussing multiple compositions in progress across his correspondence with Van Doesburg, and the different stages of their development. Though each composition is distinctly individual, exploring their own complex internal relationships and tensions, together they reveal the common lines of thought that occupied Mondrian as he pursued these new ideas. He quickly recognised that he had reached a key breakthrough with this striking pictorial idiom: “I have now made something which pleases me more than all I did before…” he wrote. “It has cost me a lot of searching through, ever since I have been here [in Paris]” (Letter to T. van Doesburg, 4 December 1919; quoted in ibid., p. 276).

Composition III encapsulates the essential threads of Mondrian’s thinking at this time. The geometric, rectangular planes are subtly different in size and configuration from one another, their height or width shifting as the eye moves across the work. Delicately variegated lines cut decisively through the coloured panels, dividing the composition into distinct segments and increasing the overall sense of rhythm within the painting. While there is a general uniformity to the picture, by introducing this sense of variety within the core elements Mondrian deftly avoids repetition, using his own intuition to guide his choices and set up a harmonious composition.

At the centre, a yellow plane (notably the largest element within the painting) draws the viewer’s attention, acting as the centre of gravity for the entire composition. Directly above and below, this bright element is bracketed by planes of grey, one warmer and deeper in tone, the other slightly cooler and lighter, generating different effects as they are balanced against their neighbour. To the right and left, meanwhile, the yellow is placed alongside a plane of vibrant red and a shorter rectangle of deep, velvety black, the intensity of their hues matching the power of this central element, while above and set on a diagonal to the yellow plane, a panel of vivid cobalt blue pigment provides a striking visual counterpoint.

All three primary colours appear multiple times through the composition – while the planes of red and blue appear to be concentrated in the upper half of the canvas, the yellow tone is repeated twice towards the edges of the painting along the bottom and the extreme right hand side. Mondrian counterbalances these vivid pigments with corresponding panels of grey and black paint, placing them in a particular position so as to enhance or disrupt the patterns of pure colour. In this way, Composition III reveals the way Mondrian used colour to move the eye around the canvas, relying on a complex system of balance and imbalance.

This is further enhanced by the powerful sense of asymmetry within the configuration and shape of the panels. The central yellow plane, for example, is set ever-so-slightly off-centre, so that it sits marginally to the right of the principle axis. Similarly, there is a discrepancy in the width and height of the outer “frames” – the rectangles along the top and right edge are significantly thinner than those on the opposing sides, an impression enhanced by the presence of the notes of vibrant colour that occupy these planes. Combined, these details create an impression of centrifugal movement, the energy of the composition radiating outwards from the yellow square at the centre, yet contained within the frame of the canvas. These internal tensions set up a powerful clash between regularity and irregularity, filling the composition with a dynamism that counters the strict minimalism of Mondrian’s highly refined geometric abstract language.

For Mondrian, Composition III represented a culmination of his ideas, in particular the unique sense of balance and harmony he had been searching for. In a letter to Van Doesburg dated 15 June 1920, he recalled a recent conversation he had with the painter Leopold Survage during a visit he paid to Mondrian’s studio. “At first I showed him [Composition III], the small square one you and I liked so much. He said it wasn’t balanced and that the yellow was disharmonious against the red, etc. And the two little blues at the top did not have [a counterpart in] blue at the bottom. (I think that even this, among other things, makes it so off-centre). I then told him that we were looking for a different harmony; he said there was only one, anyway, back and forth. He also began very theoretically about colours. At that moment, however, I saw that a balanced relation does not always require harmonious colours, and started to write down something about it” (letter to T. van Doesburg, 15 June 1920; quoted in ibid., p. 283).

A striking illustration of the landmark developments he had achieved that year, Mondrian was clearly pleased with the outcome of Composition III and intended for the painting to be included in an exhibition organised by the artists’ group known as the Section d’Or in Belgium in the summer of 1920. In June he wrote that this work, along with two others, were now ready to send, he was just waiting for the address to dispatch them to. It is likely at this point that he assigned the work its title – while the three paintings he had sent to an earlier exhibition in Amsterdam were named Composition A, B, and C, for the Belgian exhibition he preferred numbers, designating them Composition I, II and III (See comment 9.01 in B108-110 in Joosten, ibid., pp. 282-283). However, after several postponements, the show never occurred, and Mondrian diligently wrapped up the present canvas, to protect it against dust. The painting remained with him until 1924, when Mondrian selected it to send to the art historian and curator Sophie Küppers, a keen advocate of modern art who organised the first exhibition of Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic works in Germany.

Küppers had initially contacted Mondrian in September 1924, on behalf of El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, who were then in the process of compiling a book titled Kunst-Ismen, chronicling the so called “isms” of modern art in the twentieth century. She quickly became interested in the artist’s work and asked if he would be interested in sending a handful of paintings to her on consignment. The following month, Küppers confirmed the safe arrival of four pictures in Hannover, “two new ones and two older ones” Mondrian reported in a letter to Til Brugman – the present work, Composition III, was included in this first shipment (Letter to T. Brugman, July 1924; quoted in ibid., p. 283). The following spring Küppers visited Paris, this time on behalf of the Kunsthandlung Kühl und Kühn in Dresden, with the aim of engaging members of the Parisian avant-garde and organising exhibitions of their work at the gallery. Küppers appears to have visited Mondrian at his studio during this trip, and secured an agreement with him – the artist sent a dozen works to her in Dresden later that summer, carefully recording them in his sketchbook, ten of them with quick, schematic drawings.

Küppers was a key advocate of Mondrian’s unique aesthetic, encouraging buyers, both private and institutional, to acquire his work and leading the charge in promoting Neo-Plasticism within Germany. Towards the end of 1926, Küppers decided to move to Russia to be with Lissitzky, and transferred the works still under consignment with her to the care of the recently renamed Kunstausstellung Kühl. Even from afar, she continued to champion Mondrian’s work, writing to collectors and museum curators about their extraordinary power and bold visual language. From her correspondence, it is clear that Mondrian relied on the income from his sales in Germany, and she was determined to ensure this support continued.

It was through Küppers’s intercession that Composition III was included, along with thirteen other works by Mondrian, in the large-scale exhibition “Wege und Richtungen der abstrakten Malerei in Europa” (“Ways and Directions of Abstract Painting in Europe”) at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim in January 1927. Organised by the museum’s director Gustav F. Hartlaub, who was a key supporter of contemporary art, the show intended to showcase the diverse approaches of such members of the avant-garde as Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Fernand Léger, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and, of course Mondrian.

Between 1929 and 1952, Composition III was with the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, before being acquired later that year by the esteemed American collectors and philanthropists Armand P. and Celeste Bartos. Armand, an architect, had known Mondrian personally during the artist’s time in New York during the Second World War, having been introduced by the dealer Sidney Janis in the early 1940s. He and Celeste would go on to assemble an impressive collection of modern and contemporary art during their lives together – their Manhattan home was filled with an extraordinary array of works, from Joan Miró’s Le Port of 1945 and Juan Gris’s Le Fumeur (Frank Haviland), to Fernand Léger’s Etude pour la ville from 1919 and a monumental work by Mark Rothko, all of which were hung alongside sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and Alexander Calder.

The Bartoses owned several other Mondrians from diverse periods of his career, including Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow from 1930 (Joosten, no. B219) and one of the artist’s famed trans-Atlantic paintings, Composition with Red and Blue (Joosten, no. B293.304), which had been purchased directly from Mondrian shortly after his arrival to New York during the War. Composition III remained in the Bartos collection until the early 1970s, before being purchased by a private collector in Germany, who generously placed the work on loan to the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst in Cottbus in the 1990s, and the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, between 2008-2015.