Mondrian Green Cows

theo van doesburg's composition viii (the cow) is a landscape oriented painting of rectangles and squares of several colors on a white ground. a large yellow square centers the composition, while the black and red rectangles abutting each other in the lower right corner hint at the lowered head of a cow which gives the painting its name. and which makes the yellow square the side of the cow. in moma's collection
Theo van Doesburg, Composition VIII (The Cow), 1918, oil on canvas, 37.5 x 63.5 cm, via MoMA

For a 20th century art history class once, I had to make a version of a work in the style of another work, so I decided to remake Guernica in de Stijl. I’d been inspired by Theo van Doesburg’s 1918 painting, Composition VIII (The Cow), which teetered on the edge of recognizable representation and de Stijl-ian abstraction, but tbh, I got the idea for Guernica because my textbook only had a black & white image of the cow, so van Doesburg’s color was completely lost to me.

piet mondrian's painting of five cows in a lush green pasture behind a fence and framed by two trees in the foreground and a canopy of trees in the background is extremely brushy, even lyrical and borderline abstract, at least up close. otherwise it looks exactly like a sunny painting of cows in a field. selling at christie's paris in april 2025
Piet Mondrian, Vaces sur le pré, c. 1905, oil on canvas on board, 31 x 39 cm, via Christie’s Paris

None of this matters at all, but I suddenly thought of van Doesburg’s cow because I just saw this sick, little Mondrian painting of cows, which is coming up for sale in Paris in the morning.

a detail of three cows painted by piet mondrian, black and white against the brushy green background of the pasture and forest, and each cow is a barely coherent composition of a couple of messy, loopy brushstrokes. one cow, on the left, in profile, is only white brushstrokes, and the green of the grass behind it, while the other two have a dab or two of black paint. a sloppy masterpiece of a detail, at christie's paris in april 2025
groene koeien: Piet Mondrian green cows, detail, via Christie’s Paris

And just look at those cows. I haven’t seen a cow that green since the van Doesburg on my first trip to MoMA. That one on the left is as green as it is white. But even more than that, just look at those brushstrokes that make up those cows. Mondrian stood at the threshold of an entirely other abstraction in 1905. What would have happened if he’d gone that way instead?

10 Apr 2025, Lot 330, Piet Mondrian, Vaches sur le pré, est. EUR80-120,000 [update: market chaos can’t hold back green cow lovers. it sold for EUR138,600] [christies]