Piet Mondriaan artwork • painting • for sale Farm with tree

Until the early 20th century, Western painting used various ways to indicate depth. For their landscapes, artists used both the atmospheric perspective – far away is hazy and bluish – and the linear perspective in which imaginary lines run imaginary to the horizon. This allowed an avenue with tall trees, as the romantic painters painted it, to suggest enormous depth. In the 20th century, the suggestion of depth in a painting is renounced by many. Mondrian, around 1906, still strongly associated with impressionism, combines the naturalistic subject with experiments in image construction, composition and spatial effect in Boom met farm. By placing a massive oak tree in the foreground and the Twente farm behind it, he creates a tension between the motif in the foreground and background. This experimentation with the visible world is an early symptom of his later search for pure abstraction. What Mondrian did may not have been so spectacular, but it is very fascinating for us.