Moulin au clair de lune

Before the straight lines and primary colors, Mondrian was a Dutch landscape painter, and around 1907 he kept returning to one windmill, the Oostzijdse mill near the water where he had grown up. Here he shows it at night, a huge dark silhouette rising against a sky he charged with deep blue and a bruised glow of moonlight. The forms are still solid and real, though he has begun pushing the color far past what the eye would actually see. Within a couple of years he moved to Paris, met Cubism, and started dismantling shapes like this one down to bare verticals and horizontals. The mill itself he painted many times over, by day and by dark.