Bauernhof hinter einem Zaun

Anyone who knows Mondrian for red, yellow and blue squares would not guess this was his. In 1904 he was 32 and had left Amsterdam for the countryside of Brabant, in the rural south of the Netherlands, where he spent about a year painting farmhouses, ditches and trees straight from what he saw. This is one of them, a gabled farmhouse set behind a fence, done in the muted greens and browns of the Dutch soil. There is no sign yet of the grids to come. The road from this quiet farm to his flat planes of primary colour ran through nearly 20 years and a move to Paris, where Cubism finally pushed him toward pure abstraction.