Stillleben mit Ingwertopf 2

Mondrian painted a ginger jar twice. The first time, around 1911, it sits on a real table among glasses and stacked canvases. Then he moved to Paris, where Picasso and Braque had just pulled objects apart into planes and facets, and he painted the pot again in 1912. In this second version the table things have nearly dissolved. A scaffold of short black lines runs across the canvas, and the objects show only as hints inside it. The one form that holds is the little rounded ginger pot, still recognisably itself amid the grid. It was here, in these same Paris years, that he dropped a letter from his name and began signing himself Mondrian rather than the Dutch Mondriaan.