The red cloud

Mention Mondrian and most people picture white grids crossed by black lines and blocks of primary color. In 1907, though, he was a Dutch landscape painter, and this is a low horizon under a wide sky with one burning red cloud riding across it. He made it in the eastern Netherlands, near the village of Oele, and the paint is loose and hot, pushed on in charged, visible strokes. What already points ahead is the willingness to take a single shape and a single strong color and let them carry the whole canvas. The pure abstraction he is remembered for was still more than 10 years in the future.