Piet Mondrian: Lozenge Composition, 1921 – Porcelain Art Mug

Mondrian turned the canvas, not the picture. In 1921 he took a square stretcher, hung it on one corner, and kept the lines inside it strictly upright and level — so the grid runs true to the world while the edges of the painting cross it at forty-five degrees. No line meets a corner; each one simply leaves. He made some seventeen of these diamond paintings and regarded them as among his most demanding.

The year matters. Mondrian had come back to Paris from wartime Holland in 1919, and by 1921 his mature vocabulary had settled: black bands of unequal weight, planes of white and grey, and the three primaries — yellow at the upper left, a small red wedge at the foot, blue closing the right-hand corner. He signed it at the lowest point, where the two bottom edges meet: PM 21.

The mug carries the painting whole. Nothing is cropped and nothing is turned: the canvas was lifted off the grey ground of the museum photograph and set on the white of the porcelain, standing on its point at the centre of the front, 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, Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray, 1921; oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., 1957.307. Public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.