Devotion

Anyone who knows Mondrian only for his grids of red, blue and yellow would not guess he painted this. In 1908 he was 36 and still a figurative painter in the Netherlands, and here a young girl sits with her face tilted up toward a single flower, her hair burning orange against cool blue and lilac. That year he had seen the luminist work of the older Dutch painter Jan Toorop and taken up its intense, near-glowing colour. Mondrian was also drawn to theosophy around this time, and the girl's rapt upward gaze gives the picture its title, Devotion, though who she was is unknown. The pointed dabs of bright paint come straight out of the divisionist technique he was absorbing just then.