Composition with Double Line and Yellow (unfinished)

Writing to the De Stijl architect J.J.P. Oud in a letter dated 22 December 1932, Piet Mondrian described an important new strand of thinking that was emerging in his latest compositions, driving his work in a new direction: “I am doing new research: canvases with double lines,” he explained, “which enable me to achieve much greater clarity” (quoted in Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1994, p. 254). For more than a decade, Mondrian had diligently explored the visual possibilities of Neo-Plasticism, the revolutionary approach to abstraction he had pioneered towards the end of the First World War. Using only the fundamental elements of painting—the straight line, primary colors and the three non-colors of black, white and gray—Mondrian believed that he could create an idealized pictorial form of pure equilibrium that would reintegrate a fundamental sense of beauty into life. The introduction of the double line to his repertoire in 1932 opened an entirely new chapter in Mondrian’s art, building on the highly refined, minimalist aesthetic of his so-called “classical phase,” to create some of the most dynamic and complex compositions of his career.
Begun in 1934, just two years after this initial breakthrough, Composition with Double Line and Yellow is filled with a dynamic and carefully constructed internal energy, centered around the crossing in the upper left hand side of a pair of almost identical horizontal lines as they intersect with a single, vertical axis. In the top corner, a thin plane of yellow stands on the periphery of the composition and appears to radiate upwards, beyond the limits of the canvas. However, it is the impact of the double black lines, their visual power further enhanced by the artist’s limited palette, that the true focus of the composition lies. In contrast to his earlier double-line canvases, such as Composition with Double Line and Yellow (Joosten, no. B237; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), here Mondrian creates a wider space between the pair of horizontal lines, exploring a different visual tension in the space between the two and lending an alternative sense of motion and tempo to the composition. In a letter from the beginning of the year, Mondrian outlined this new direction with the motif: “In my last things the double line widens to form a plane, and yet it remains a line. Be that as it may, I believe that this question is one of those which may lie beyond the realm of theory, and which are of such subtlety that they are rooted in the mystery of ‘art.’ But all that is not yet clear in my mind!” (Letter to J. Gorin, 31 January 1934; quoted in C. Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction, London, 1994, p. 215).
However, 1934 was a difficult year for Mondrian—a harsh cold winter, followed by serious health issues and recurring bouts of fatigue significantly limited his ability to work. As a result, although a number of compositions were begun at this time, they remained in a liminal state, with lightly sketched lines of pencil, charcoal, chalk and ink still visible on the surface of the painting, traces of the artist’s thinking as he explored different arrangements and positionings of the lines. Sections of primed canvas also remained untouched, awaiting the painstaking application of subsequent layers of pigment, which Mondrian would build through a time consuming process that allowed for long periods of drying between each layer to achieve the desired effect. Of the eleven canvases dated to 1934 in the catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work compiled by Joop M. Joosten, more than half remained “unfinished” in this way. As Hans Janssen has pointed out, “In those years, painting had increasingly become a matter of… considering, polishing, concentration and pondering over the result…,” with Mondrian ruminating at length on the potential tensions and effects of different lines and pigments in particular combinations with one another, before reaching the final iteration of a composition (Piet Mondrian: A Life, London, 2022, p. 325). Due to the disruptions in his health, which continued into early 1935 and resulted in several months where he remained completely unable to work, the period of reflection and contemplation remained open-ended for these paintings.
Instead, this concentrated group of canvases from 1934 offer a rare and important insight into Mondrian’s working process through these years. In Composition with Double Line and Blue, now at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (mumok) in Vienna (Joosten, no. B250), he investigated a similar compositional layout as the present canvas, but shifted the vertical line slightly further to the left, generating a more asymmetrical balance within the composition. Between the horizontal lines, the shadows of two further strips of charcoal remain visible, their forms gently rubbed out by the artist’s hand in favor of a wider band of white. Composition with Double Lines and Yellow (Joosten no. B248; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main), meanwhile, retains a complex secondary pattern of charcoal and pencil lines in the center of the canvas, their thinly sketched forms overlapping and intersecting with the painted black lines and panels of white and golden yellow, suggesting multiple alternate placements for each element. This canvas also reveals that Mondrian often left a small buffer zone either side of a proposed line, so that the thickness of a band of black paint could be subtly adjusted for the final composition without affecting the neighboring planes of color. In the present Composition with Double Line and Yellow, Mondrian appears to have questioned the placement of the higher of the two horizontal lines, the light strokes of charcoal still visible through the yellow pigment suggesting that he initially toyed with having it closer to the upper edge of the canvas.
As is evident from a number of photographs of this period, Mondrian was increasingly open to allowing visitors to the studio to see canvases that were still under construction, offering a glimpse behind the scenes into his meticulous creative process. For example, when the American designer Eugene Lux and his wife, the sculptor Gwendoline Lux, visited the artist in April 1934, they encountered several canvases which showed the vestiges of the preliminary dark lines still visible on the white primed surfaces. Two months later, Mondrian wrote to Lux to request copies of the photos he had taken during the visit, as they recorded the canvases in their “primitive and imperfect” states (quoted in H. Janssen, op. cit., p. 357). Laying bare the myriad revisions and adjustments, the rounds of trial and error, that lay behind the artist’s highly controlled visual language, these canvases trace the intense process of observation, testing and revision that went into each composition. As such, they reinforce Mondrian’s assertion that his approach was ultimately determined by instinct and intuition, rooted in careful and prolonged contemplation, and shaped by the artist’s own personal vision for the artwork. “It is not important to make many pictures,” he once proclaimed, “but that I have the picture right” (quoted in H. Cooper and R. Spronk, Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings, exh. cat., Harvard University Art Museums, 2001, p. 53).