Dunes near Domburg

Before adopting the geometric, abstract idiom for which he is best known, Mondrian was primarily a landscape painter. This view near Domburg, a Dutch seaside resort on the North Sea, belongs to a period of transition during which the artist experimented with increasingly stylized modes of representation. Here he used dense layers of hatching to capture graphically a landscape of sand dunes sculpted by the wind and rain. The sweeping curves and the detail of the monogram at lower left recall Mondrian's interest in Art Nouveau at the turn of the twentieth century.