Windmill

Piet Mondrian

About 1917

Oil on canvas

Dallas Museum of Art

Even in his own lifetime, Piet Mondrian was lauded as the founder of the most modern, avant-garde art movement of the 20th century. Nevertheless, before he developed Neo-Plasticism, in which pictorial elements are reduced to a black grid on a white ground with contained fields of primary colors, he enjoyed a successful career as a figurative painter. In 1917 he began a series of works depicting an old windmill near his home on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Seen from a low, close vantage point, the motif was a constant through which Mondrian explored dramatic color and lighting effects. In Windmill, the expressive application of cool b