Irises c. 1910

Piet Mondrian painted "Irises" with oil on canvas, sometime before he got all into the grid. Look at how he's put down the color, yellow layered with ochre in long vertical strokes, almost like he's blocking in the tones, and the shapes of the flowers in pale blue. It's all about process, like he's figuring it out as he goes along. There’s a real sensitivity to the materiality of paint here, the way the colors interact, the roughness of the strokes, that gives the painting its energy. Take a look at the top left corner, there’s a stroke of pure pale blue just on the edge of the petals, where it meets the yellow ground. It gives the flower its form, but it also speaks to the painting as an object, not just a representation. You can see that Mondrian is already moving towards abstraction, looking at the formal elements of painting, the lines and colors themselves. You could say this connects him to painters like Marsden Hartley, also doing a kind of representational work that’s really about the stuff that paint can do. It's all about embracing ambiguity, letting a painting be a bunch of things at once.