Evolution 1911

This is Piet Mondrian's 'Evolution', made with oil paint, a triptych, and very unusual for him! Here's what I'm thinking... The color is blue, but not just blue, it's as if he painted the essence of blue: blue of the sea, blue of the sky, blue of melancholy. He’s laying down thin layers of paint, trying to find some truth about women...some essence of woman! It is not just representation but, maybe, trying to capture something of the divine feminine. The way the figures gaze into the distance, or have their eyes closed, reminds me of the pre-moderns but here Mondrian is using abstraction to get somewhere else. What he gets to later, with all those grids! I mean, you can almost see them coming. We can think of each painting as a visual record of the artist's process, a map of their mental and emotional landscape. Painting is an act of inquiry, a way of making sense of our world and our place within it.