Before Piet Mondrian became synonymous with grids and primary colours, he was a painter of trees, farms, and stillness. Born in 1872 in the Netherlands, Mondrian’s early artistic career was rooted in the natural world. His landscapes, though representational, already hinted at a deeper interest in balance, proportion, and underlying structure. Influenced by the Hague School, Symbolism, and later the expressive colour of Post-Impressionism, Mondrian gradually began to strip back detail in favour of line, form, and mood. A key moment in his development came when he encountered Theosophy, a spiritual philosophy that shaped his belief in harmony and the universal. In 1911, a move to Paris and his exposure to Cubism accelerated his evolution, prompting a dramatic simplification of form. By the early 1920s, he had co-founded the De Stijl movement and developed what he called Neo-Plasticism — a radical visual language built from rectangles, black lines, and pure colour.
This post traces Mondrian’s artistic transformation through five carefully chosen works. We begin with Farm near Duivendrecht, a quietly structured landscape from his early years, before leaping ahead to Composition in Colour A, a late masterpiece of geometric purity. In between, we witness his shift from naturalism to abstraction — The Red Tree blazing in simplified form, Tableau no. 1 breaking the world down to planes and lines, and Composition with Large Blue Plane embracing the aesthetic order of Neo-Plasticism. Together, these prints reflect the arc of Mondrian’s life and legacy: an artist who began with the rhythms of nature and ended by inventing an entirely new way of seeing.
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Farm Near Duivendrecht, by Piet Mondrian
1. Farm Near Duivendrecht (c.1916)
Before his grids and geometry reshaped modern art, Piet Mondrian was quietly painting Dutch farmhouses nestled among trees. Farm near Duivendrecht, created around 1916, is one of several works depicting the Weltevrede farm near Amsterdam — a site Mondrian returned to repeatedly across more than a decade. Painted during World War I, this piece reflects a brief re-engagement with naturalistic scenes, possibly in response to patrons who preferred representational work during a time of uncertainty. Yet even in this outwardly traditional composition, there is something distinctively Mondrian: a sense of order underlying the organic, and a compositional clarity that suggests the beginnings of something more radical.
The painting’s subdued twilight palette — dusty purples, browns, and fading orange light — evokes a gentle stillness, but it’s the structure of the scene that speaks to Mondrian’s emerging vision. The bare trees and low farmhouse are reduced to verticals and horizontals, an architectural rhythm that feels more constructed than observed. These elements foreshadow the Neo-Plasticism that would come to define his later work, where balance, geometry, and clarity replaced the visible world entirely. Farm near Duivendrecht sits at a quiet crossroads in Mondrian’s career: a moment when the pastoral and the abstract were still in dialogue, each informing the other.
The Red Tree, by Piet Mondrian
2. The Red Tree (c.1908-1910)
Painted between 1908 and 1910, The Red Tree represents a bold turning point in Piet Mondrian’s career. At first glance, it’s a striking image: a leafless tree flaring in red against a background of deep blue and violet. But beneath the vibrant surface lies a deeper artistic shift. This work was the first in a series of tree paintings Mondrian created as he began to explore abstraction — not by abandoning nature, but by analysing its internal rhythms and structures. Influenced by Symbolism and Post-Impressionism, he sought to express something more essential than surface appearance: a spiritual resonance, a deeper order.
What’s remarkable about The Red Tree is how much of Mondrian’s later style is already nascent within it. The sinuous branches form a network of lines that suggest an underlying geometry, while the heightened colour points towards a break with naturalistic representation. The brushwork is dynamic, and the palette deeply expressive — a sign of Mondrian’s belief in art as a path to inner truth. Though still rooted in the visible world, this painting strips nature back to its core energy. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for the abstraction that would come to define his legacy.
Tableau No. 1, by Piet Mondrian
3. Tableau No. 1 (c. 1913)
Painted in 1913, Tableau No. 1 reveals a critical shift in Piet Mondrian’s practice as he embraced the formal strategies of Cubism. Following his move to Paris in 1911, Mondrian encountered the works of Picasso and Braque, whose analytical approach to structure and perspective left a profound impact. In this painting, we can still trace the underlying form of a tree — the motif he had explored so thoroughly in earlier years — but it has been dismantled into planes of grey, ochre, and white, bordered by a web of vertical and horizontal lines. The natural world has not disappeared, but it has been deconstructed, abstracted, and reordered.
The subdued palette and fractured space reflect Mondrian’s exploration of Cubist technique, but already he is pushing beyond it. The composition builds outward from a central structure, creating a sense of internal order and calm, even as the forms seem to dissolve. In this work, Mondrian is no longer depicting nature — he is attempting to express the forces beneath it. Tableau No. 1 stands at the threshold of Neo-Plasticism, offering a vision of the world not as it appears, but as it might be understood through balance, clarity, and universal harmony.
Composition with Large Blue Plane, by Piet Mondrian
4. Composition with Large Blue Plane (c. 1921)
By 1921, Piet Mondrian had fully embraced the principles of Neo-Plasticism, a movement he co-founded that sought to distil art to its most fundamental elements. Composition with Large Blue Plane exemplifies this philosophy. The painting features a dominant blue rectangle, balanced by smaller blocks of red, yellow, grey, and white, all delineated by thick black lines. This asymmetrical arrangement creates a dynamic equilibrium, reflecting Mondrian’s belief in the harmony of opposing forces.
Mondrian’s use of primary colours and non-colours (black, white, and grey) eliminates any representational references, focusing instead on the intrinsic relationships between form and colour. The composition’s flatness and lack of depth further emphasise its abstract nature, inviting viewers to engage with the painting on a purely visual level. Through this work, Mondrian sought to express universal truths and a sense of spiritual order, aligning with the ideals of the De Stijl movement.
Composition in Colour A, by Piet Mondrian
5. Composition in Colour A (c. 1917)
At first glance, Composition in Colour A might appear to belong to the same world as Mondrian’s later grid paintings — but look again, and its idiosyncrasies stand out. Painted in 1917, the work occupies a fascinating mid-point in his evolution: it reflects the stripped-down geometry of Neo-Plasticism, yet it has not yet acquired the rigid grid or strictly primary palette of his mature style. Instead, squares in rose, ochre, and ultramarine float freely across the canvas, punctuated by short black bars. The background is white, but textured, with signs of underpainting and revision. This is abstraction in motion — not yet polished into system, but already liberated from nature.
What makes this piece especially compelling is how it builds on the lessons of the earlier works we’ve seen. From the pseudo-architectural of The Red Tree to the fractured spaces of Tableau No. 1, Mondrian was always searching for a structure behind appearances. Here, that search yields a new kind of spatial rhythm: not a picture of the world, but a composition of pure relationships. The coloured planes do not describe an object — they simply exist, balanced through contrast and repetition. Composition in Colour A is not only a key step toward the iconic grids to come, but also a reminder that Mondrian’s abstraction was never static. It was alive — experimental, spiritual, and always evolving.
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Piet Mondrian’s path from serene Dutch landscapes to radical abstraction was not a sudden leap but a deliberate unfolding — a gradual refinement of vision. Across these five works, we’ve seen him move from observed nature to a world of floating forms and pure relationships. Yet at every stage, a consistent thread runs through: the search for balance, harmony, and the essence of structure. Whether in the geometry of a farmhouse or the rhythm of coloured planes, Mondrian was never content to depict — he aimed to distil.
Today, his influence can be felt far beyond the gallery wall. From design and fashion to architecture and digital media, the legacy of Neo-Plasticism endures. But at its core, Mondrian’s art remains deeply personal — a spiritual effort to bring clarity to a chaotic world. In revisiting these five works, we glimpse not only the evolution of a painter, but the quiet revolution of an idea: that abstraction can reveal more, not less.
