Windmill

By 1917 Piet Mondrian was helping launch De Stijl, the Dutch magazine and movement that pushed art toward flat planes of colour and straight black lines. So a dark, dramatically lit windmill looming up close is not what you expect from him that year. He had gone home to the Netherlands to visit family in 1914, and the war shut the borders behind him and kept him out of Paris until 1919. Back among the Dutch mills he had painted years earlier, he returned to the old motif and stood almost underneath it. He said he found a mill like that beautiful precisely because it stood too close to take in whole, that it would not fit into normal perspective and forced him toward a freer kind of expression. That pressure, an everyday object pushed right up against the eye until it begins to flatten, is the thread running on to the pure grids he is remembered for. The painting is now in Dallas, a gift from the collector Margaret McDermott.