20th Century Art in 20 Unforgettable Works: Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition (unfinished)’

Emily Fisher Landau was, simply put, one of the greatest collectors and patrons of the twentieth century. Her legacy is set apart for her deep and longstanding involvement with leading institutions, in particular the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as her profound engagement with the art and artists of her time and her unerring instinct as a collector at the highest level. Fisher Landau assembled one of the greatest collections of modern and contemporary art – over 100 works of which are coming to auction at Sotheby’s on 8–9 November.

Join us over the next 20 days leading up to the Emily Fisher Landau Evening Auction on 8 November as our specialists spotlight 20 key works from the Collection, celebrating their impact on twentieth-century art. Here, Allegra Bettini reflects on the significance of Piet Mondrian’s Composition (unfinished) as part of our series The Emily Fisher Landau Collection: Twentieth Century Art in Twenty Unforgettable Works.

Piet Mondrian was one of the greatest conceptual artists of the twentieth century, though one who is too often misunderstood. The crisp articulation of line and distilled palette that define his mature oeuvre can seem at times mathematical, almost rote – read as minimalist for the sake of aesthetic appeal yet without further explication – when really, Mondrian’s work was deeply humanistic, philosophically so. He sought to depict the essence of the human experience in its purest pictorial format.

For me, the beauty in Composition (unfinished), and in Mondrian’s process works more broadly, is that you can sense the presence of the artist in every inch of the canvas. With each line and intersection, you can almost feel Mondrian’s hand moving across the canvas, carefully recalibrating, erasing and shifting the lines that define the rhythm of the piece. The tiny pinholes which dot its surface trace Mondrian’s movements as he planned future compositions, pinning and unpinning colored strips to the canvas.

This work was executed in 1938, such a pivotal time in the artist’s career – he’d just left Paris for London, but all the while had his heart set on New York – and you can sense a change in his approach at this juncture. His lines have multiplied, the interstices between them have narrowed and greater feeling of movement arises in these works. Of the few canvases created during his brief time in London, Composition (unfinished) is one of the most prescient – its gridded pattern is remarkably similar to works like Broadway Boogie Woogie at the Museum of Modern Art, and it seems to pulsate with the nascent energy that’s later realized in his greatest New York paintings.

Standing before its monumental scale, you can almost imagine what the artist must have felt upon arriving in the mesmerizing metropolises of London and New York.

Past Auction

The Emily Fisher Landau Collection: An Era Defined | Evening Auction

8 November 2023 | 6:00 PM EST | New York