Piet Mondrian

He turned a square canvas onto its corner to hang like a diamond — not a one-off trick, he kept coming back to the format for years.

This one's built from strips of coloured tape rather than paint, and it was never finished. A curator worked out a few years back that it's likely been hanging upside down since the 1940s — and from what I've read they're leaving it that way, because the tape has gone so fragile that turning it now could take the whole thing apart.

He'd not long landed in New York when he made this, and it's said he was mad about boogie-woogie records and dancing — the title's the music, not just the street. Supposedly the little coloured blocks are the city seen from above, all traffic and lights, though I couldn't find him ever spelling that out himself.

This is one of Mondrian's diamond-shaped 'lozenge' canvases — apparently he kept returning to the format through the late twenties and thirties, paring the paintings down until almost nothing was left on them. Naming it after a dance feels almost like a joke next to how little is actually happening on the canvas.

This started off a run of tree paintings he kept at for years — each one taking a bit more out, according to Wikipedia, until the trees eventually turned into straight lines and blocks and stopped being trees at all.

I couldn't turn up much on this exact one, but Mondrian returned to this same farm and its reflection again and again in these years, like something about it wouldn't let him go.

Mondrian, from what I've read, believed grids like this could help build a calmer, more honest world after the first World War — a strict visual language everyone could read the same way.

The person who painted this later became known for stripping everything down to grids of flat colour — no fog, no moonlight, nothing like this left in it at all. It's strange to look at this soft, moonlit scene and picture the same hand ending up there.

I couldn't dig up much on this specific one — Mondrian made dozens of these grid paintings in the early 1920s, and I can't find what set this particular one apart from the rest.

One of a run of tree paintings he made over a few years, each one supposedly a little further from looking like a tree than the one before. That run is what ends up at the black lines and flat colour blocks he's known for now.

According to what I've read, around this time Mondrian narrowed his palette down to red, yellow, blue, black, white and grey and nothing else, chasing the De Stijl idea that a painting could be stripped to its barest elements and still hold together. This is one of the grid paintings people mean when they say 'Neoplasticism.'

Windmills like this show up again and again in Mondrian's early sketches — they say he treated the subject almost like a scale exercise, working the same dark, misty mood over and over before he gave up landscape for good.