Word: offing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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During the two decades before World War II, when he moved from Paris to New York to escape the Nazis, Mondrian used a language of horizontal and vertical black lines, blocks of primary colors, white and gray.
Harvard's new painting is from the very beginning of this period.
Born in 1872, Mondrian spent the early part of his career painting Dutch landscapes. He discovered cubism in the second decade of the 20th century, but tried to bring his work beyond it.
"Composition with Blue, Black, Yellow and Red" was painted after the artist's invention of a style he dubbed neo-plasticism, which he wrote about extensively in the Dutch journal De Stijl (The Style). The magazine called for the unification of the arts behind spiritual progress and social change.
"He was 50 years old when he made this painting, which is remarkably late for an artist to find his major style," Cooper said. "That grid of lines you see in cubist paintings has become the entire subject, and whatever still-life objects there might have been within that grid...