Cleveland Museum of Art

Field with Young Trees in the Foreground

Piet MondrianLinkedCulture matchlcp-fc94a5b1b75a

Date: c. 1907
Medium: oil on paper laid on board
Culture: Netherlands
Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
Institution: Cleveland Museum of Art
Object ID: 146023

From the Cleveland Museum of Art record

This painting depicts a field around the hamlet of Oele in the eastern Netherlands, where Mondrian lived during the summer of 1907. The evocative mood created by the trees silhouetted against a twilight sky suggests that Mondrian’s search for spirituality was present before he began painting completely abstract or non-objective compositions in 1916. Guided by readings in metaphysics and philosophy, Mondrian sought to achieve a higher spiritual reality in his paintings, which eventually led him to eliminate all representational elements in favor of a style of pure geometric abstraction. Mondrian was a prolific writer drawn to spiritual studies and he believed that art and philosophy were deeply interconnected.

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Provenance & credit

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Credit line: Gift of Frank Stella
Provenance: -1971: Frank Stella [1936- ] New York, NY by gift to the Cleveland Museum of Art | 1971-: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH