Evolution

Before the white canvases with black lines and blocks of primary colour, Piet Mondrian painted this: a triptych of a naked woman, three times, against deep blue. He had joined the Theosophical Society in 1909, drawn to its idea that the soul climbs through stages toward higher awareness, and the three panels read as that ascent, the central figure raised slightly above the other two, her head glowing yellow. He finished it in 1911, the same year he left the Netherlands for Paris and walked straight into Cubism. What he saw there pulled him away from symbols like these toward pure line and grid within a couple of years. The flowers flanking each figure are geometric already, six-pointed and diamond-shaped rather than botanical.