Dune IV

Dune IV was completed by Piet Mondrian in 1910, most likely in the region of Zeeland, where he spent his summers on vacation for a number of years.

This painting features incredibly vibrant colour, which many would label as fauvist in appearance. One can view the work of artists like Matisse to understand quite the level of work that they put into choosing colour combinations, and this would essentially become their main concern. Mondrian worked within a number of different art movements during his career, including impressionism, expressionism, cubism plus what we find here. He was not an official member of any of these groups, merely demonstrated clear influences at different stages of his career. His changes in style were particularly common in his younger years, where a style of his own was still developing and it would be several decades before he would settle upon the neo-plasticist style for which he is now most famous.

Whilst there has been a growing interest in his landscape paintings over recent years, most were produced in more conventional colour schemes. There would be tones of yellow, blue and green, just as one would expect within a seascape featuring beaches and perhaps some small piers. In Dune IV, however, the relatively bare content found here is excitingly delivered with incredible tones of orange which deliberately work beautifully alongside the tones of blue and pink. Detail is minimal, and so the artist just concentrates on colour, with this almost being a study piece for later work. In all, his work in and around the town of Domberg was highly skilled and exploratory, but until now has been relatively ignored in favour of his abstract work, such as Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow and Broadway Boogie Woogie.