Piet Mondrian Composition 

Composition is the title of a painting by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.

He painted it in 1929. It's an oil painting on canvas.

The dimensions of the painting are 17 and 3/4 inches by 17and 7/8 inches

Or 45.09 centimeters by 45.72 centimeters. The painting is almost an exact square. It is in the Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

The simplest way to describe Composition is to say that it is a large square, and within the large square are a smaller square and 7 rectangles of various sizes. The square is white, and the rectangles are white, red, blue, yellow, and black. These areas are separated by straight, black, thick lines about ½ inch wide. Mondrian used a ruler to paint these lines, so the lines are absolutely straight and have a precise, hard edge.

Composition is a good example of Mondrian's ideas about what makes a good painting. First of all, he maintained that art should not concern itself with reproducing images of real objects in the world. He thought art should express only the universal absolutes that underlie reality. So he rejected all sensuous qualities like texture, and the illusion of depth, and a wide palette of colors. Besides black and white, he used only the primary colors-red, blue, and yellow. These three are called primary because they are pure colors and you can make any other color my mixing them. And his compositions are composed of flat areas of colors in the geometric shapes of squares and rectangles. There are only right angles and straight lines in his paintings. No curves or any other shapes.

In Composition, Mondrian placed the areas of color along the edges of the painting. There's a red rectangle in the upper left corner. A very thin blue rectangle is along the right edge taking up about 1/3 of the length of that side. And along the bottom edge of the painting, there is a thin yellow rectangle and a shorter thin black rectangle. There is a large white rectangle along the top edge of the painting, and another large white rectangle along the left edge.

These rectangles all surround a large white square, placed off center. So it's closer to the right and bottom edges of the painting, rather than equal distance from all four sides. The white square is the largest area in the painting. But even though it's the biggest thing in the painting and it's not centered, the entire composition feels balanced because of the colored rectangles. Color carries more visual weight than white, so there's a subtle tension established between the colors and the white expanse. This tension visually balances the asymmetrical placement of elements. Mondrian has carefully calculated the size, shape and color of each rectangle so that there is a perfect visual balance.