Stillleben mit Ingwertopf I

In 1911 Mondrian was still a long way from the grids of red, yellow and blue that would later make his name. That year he threw himself into Cubism, and the ginger jar at the centre of this table served as a kind of test. He painted the scene twice. In this first version the naturalism mostly holds. You can still read the glass, the pot and the soft blues and roses carried over from his earlier Dutch pictures, and the small stoneware jar anchors the arrangement in the middle. He borrowed from Cezanne the trick of letting brushwork run past the edges of objects, loosening their outlines. In the second version, made soon after, that same jar breaks up into a scaffold of straight lines.