Piet Mondrian: Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1927 – Porcelain Art Mug

This is the picture most people mean when they say Mondrian. A square canvas of about fifty centimetres, a few black bands of unequal weight, and three colours that are mixed with nothing: red in the upper left, yellow held in a narrow strip at the right edge, blue lying along the bottom. Everything else is white and grey.

The balance is not symmetry. Mondrian set the largest field off centre, gave the left column its own width, and let the yellow run as a sliver rather than a block — so the weight of the small red square at the top is answered by the long blue at the foot. He called this equilibrium, and meant it as a way of seeing rather than a style. By 1927 he had been working at it for nearly a decade in his Paris studio on the rue du Départ, where he arranged the walls, the furniture and the easel by the same rules.

The painting reaches the mug straight. The museum photograph was taken slightly off-axis, so it was rectified from its four corners: the black bands now stand truly upright and level on the porcelain, and the canvas is shown whole, its own worn edges included, at the same height as every other work in this collection. The last gallery image shows the photograph it came from.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1927; oil on canvas, 49.5 × 49.5 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Contemporary Collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1967.215. Public domain (CC0).

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.