Der graue Baum

Mondrian painted this in 1911, a Dutch artist in his late thirties who had spent years on landscapes and had lately been reading Theosophy, looking for an order underneath the visible world. The tree here is real, a bare winter trunk with its branches thrown out, but he has already begun pulling it apart into a web of black arcs and grey planes that lock together across the whole surface. Late that year he saw Picasso and Braque for the first time at an exhibition in Amsterdam, and early in 1912 he packed up and moved to Paris to be near their Cubism. This tree stands right at that hinge. Follow the branches outward and you can watch them stop describing a tree and start becoming pure line, the horizontal and vertical strokes he would eventually keep and almost nothing else.