Cézanne and Beyond: Mondrian

Paul Cézanne - Château Noir, 1900-1904
oil on canvas
Washington DC National Gallery of Art

Piet Mondrian - Opposition of Lines, Red and Yellow

By 1920, Mondrian had reduced his pictures to a grid of verticals and horizontals -- the same grid that Cézanne, even at his most disorderly, had relied on 40 years before. Mondrian's flat fields of unmixed color, bordered in black, can also be spotted in details in most of Cézanne's paintings. Mondrian said that Cézanne had discovered that everything has a geometric basis, that painting consists solely of color oppositions. That doesn't even start to explain Cézanne, but it's a fine account of the small part of him that Mondrian drew on (Blake Gopnik in W.Post).


(Washington DC National Gallery of Art)

(Cézanne)