Cleveland Museum of Art

Field with Young Trees in the Foreground

Piet Mondrian

Date

c. 1907

Medium

oil on paper laid on board

Culture

Netherlands

Department

Modern European Painting and Sculpture

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

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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