I want to throw a rock through this painting and watch it shatter like the cruddy stained glass window it reminds me of. Give me a straight edge and canvas, and I could make this same exact painting. This says a lot since my mother has never been proud of a single one of my art projects (but of course she hangs up everything my little brothers bring home, not jealous… okay, a little jealous). I will admit, with my art handicap, it would take me a significant amount of time to reproduce Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, but I would be able to get it done eventually.

I get what Mondrian’s game is. He’s a harbinger for what Rothko would do. Here are a bunch of shapes and colors that are meant to be abstractions of the human condition. The viewer is supposed to feel an emotion from Composition, but all I get is sterility. One then could argue that the painting is supposed to be a clean, organized color-wash of bareness, but most of the Mondrian paintings I have examined are exactly that. I feel no emotion or strong feelings when looking at this painting, which makes me feel it shouldn’t be studied unless you want to go to sleep.

Sigh… I have just thoroughly bashed this painting. I feel like the professional art historians in the room are collectively judging me as an ignorant punk who knows nothing about art. I would then confirm their beliefs by showing them my third grade art project.

All my quibbling aside though, why is Piet Mondrian’s Composition up on a museum wall? First off, Mondrian’s work launched a new movement in modern art called De Stijl. This basically consists of abstraction at its most basic form. Mondrian believed he could break every object down to simple shapes, foreshadowing how science would soon be able to break down matter to its simplest form: atoms. A little time after that, scientists could even split those. Composition embodies a very modern form of thought that predicted many absurd impossibilities passing into the realm of possible. The idea of being able to break things down into the smallest building blocks of life was far beyond Mondrian’s years and incredibly brilliant. I just believed it failed in the execution.