Chrysanthemum

Piet Mondrian is famous for his paintings of irregular black grids on white backgrounds interspersed with rectangles in bright primary colors. Less familiar are the still lives and landscapes from earlier in his career. Chrysanthemum of 1900 reveals his early taste for naturalism inherited from the Hague School but ultimately indebted to the influence of the French Barbizon painters. In an autobiographical essay, Mondrian confessed: I was always a realist . . . I always enjoyed painting flowers, not bouquets, but a single flower at a time. This austere presentation of the chrysanthemum is nonetheless innovative. Mondrian would renew his interest in flower painting again around 1908, but he substituted the natural brownish palette used here for a brighter, more artificial one.