Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray

Piet Mondrian · 1921

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

60 × 60 cm (23 5/8 × 23 5/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

Tilted forty-five degrees on its point, this diamond-format canvas turns Mondrian's language of right angles into something unexpectedly dynamic — the grid now cuts toward the edges with quiet tension. By 1921 Mondrian had fully committed to Neoplasticism, the austere visual philosophy he co-founded through the De Stijl movement. Working with only primary colors, black, white, and gray, he believed that stripping painting back to these absolute elements could express a universal harmony beneath the chaos of the visible world. The lozenge format was central to this: rotating the canvas freed the lines from any suggestion of horizon or ground, making the composition feel genuinely abstract rather than representational. Mondrian returned to the lozenge shape repeatedly throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the Art Institute of Chicago holds one of the most celebrated examples, its asymmetric grid of colored planes still startlingly alive after more than a century. Every line, interval, and block of color in this hand-painted oil reproduction has been studied and rendered by a skilled artist working directly from the original — the same deliberate restraint, the same precise weight of black against yellow, captured in oil on canvas just as Mondrian intended.