Die rote Mühle

Mondrian is remembered for grids of red, blue and yellow, but around 1910 he was still painting recognizable Dutch things, dunes and church towers and windmills. He set this one, a mill he had seen near the coastal town of Domburg, straight in front of the viewer and let its red body rear up against a blue evening sky, far bigger and hotter in color than any real mill. It is paint pushed toward pure feeling. In 1911 Mondrian showed work at a large modern exhibition in Amsterdam and saw paintings by Picasso and Braque for the first time. Cubism hit him hard, and he soon left for Paris and began breaking the world into lines. The mill still stands upright and whole, the last kind of subject he would paint that way.