PIET MONDRIAN

Piet Mondrian painted Composition with Blue and Yellow during a phase in the early 1930s when he sought relative symmetry and equilibrium in his signature Neoplastic ("New Form") style. Invented in 1920, this style eliminated any subject matter related to the natural world. Instead, Mondrian turned his focus to the relationships among just a few structural elements: horizontal and vertical lines of different lengths and thicknesses and rectilinear planes of color (restricted to the primary colors red, yellow, and blue) juxtaposed with planes of what Mondrian called "non-color" (white, gray, and black). In this work, bisecting lines cross the entire composition in the upper-right region, and a shorter but wider black bar subdivides the right-hand vertical margin. The resulting irregular grid creates five planes—two of color and three in white—whose sizes, proportions, and shapes are never repeated but still balanced.