Moulin au soleil

Think of Mondrian and you think of white grids and blocks of red, yellow and blue. In 1908 he was still painting windmills. This one, the Winkel mill in the Dutch countryside, he lit up in raw red against a sky of yellow and blue, the paint laid on in thick separate strokes. He later called this the point where he began to change, when he started pushing colour past what the eye actually saw toward something stronger. When he showed work like it in Amsterdam the following year, the reaction was loud enough that he and two friends mounted their own exhibition. The three primary colours already run through the whole canvas, more than ten years before he reduced everything to them.