Composition with red, yellow and blue, composed by Piet Mondrian from 1937-1942 possesses a sense of simplicity whilst simultaneously comprises of complexity.

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Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue.

Composition with red, yellow and blue, composed by Piet Mondrian from 1937-1942 possesses a sense of simplicity whilst simultaneously comprises of complexity. Mondrian has used oil on canvas as his materials and has created the artwork to a size of 72.7 cm by 69.2 cm. Composition with red, yellow and blue is currently located at the Tate Gallery.

Piet Mondrian was Dutch but spent most of his time in Holland and Paris.

The art movement that Composition with red, yellow and blue was created in was Surrealism.

Piet Mondrian was associated with the mystique that an artwork could attain. He joined the Theosophical Society in 1909, and hence forward began to produce works, which had an abstract sense and another meaning to them. When Mondrian went to Paris – his inspiration – the Cubists, Mondrian viewed the work there in 1911-1913. After returning to Holland in 1914, Mondrian was fascinated by abstract paintings. With the war outbreak in Holland, Mondrian was forced to stay in Holland, where in 1916-1917, he helped form the Neo-Plasticism movement. Neo-plasticism impacted and brought out the best in a number of people, where it broke down the forms of nature, reducing the form to a pure, abstract design.

In the painting, Composition with red, yellow and blue, the overall image somewhat resembles a grid, where two squares have been coloured in, and two other places have been coloured across the grid. There are eight vertical lines spanning down the painting, with different lengths between each two lines. These are thick, black bold lines and create a web/structured/grid effect, and along with the four horizontal lines spanning across the painting, again, with different lengths between each line, makes the painting resemble a labyrinth. In the first box in the grid, the length is about twice as long as the width and this box is coloured a pale, bright yellow creating the effect of contrast between the white and black (outline) surrounding it. In a square near the right bottom hand corner, the colour inside it is a blood, shady red. Two the left of that box, slightly lower is a thick blue line that goes from the second box to the fourth box. The white spaces has been coloured in though, and it doesn’t cover the bold vertical lines. The blue is a mellow blue and contrasts with the red and yellow well. Finally, in the first box from the left bottom hand side, about 2/7 of the way up is a small red coloured box. This single box is near the other larger red box so it does not stand out as much.

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All the boxes that have been coloured in are of different size. The yellow box is a rectangle, the larger red box is a square, the smaller red box is a small rectangle and the blue box is a longer rectangle. This creates the effect of the colours being different to one another in colour, obviously, in size, and in the way they have been outlined and are located. The yellow and the larger red box are outlined (mostly) but the blue and the smaller red box are not outlined and just reach over a length of horizontal and ...

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