砂丘 III

1909 was the year the Dutch public first got annoyed with Mondrian. In January the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam gave him three rooms alongside two other young painters, Jan Sluijters and Cornelis Spoor, and the colour in the pictures was strong enough that reviewers treated the show as a provocation. On 25 May of the same year he joined the Dutch section of the Theosophical Society, whose members held that the visible world was a surface over something more ordered, and he stayed a member for the rest of his life.

The dunes come from those same years. Mondrian had been going to Domburg, a small resort on the Zeeland coast, since 1908, and he painted the sand hills there over and over with less in them each time. In this one the dune has come down to a few broad bands of colour meeting the sky.