However, in Mondrian’s 1912 “Bloeiende Appelboom” (“Blooming Apple Tree”), a painting in the same series, the branch diameter scaling is gone, Newberry said, with a value of 5.4.

However, in Mondrian’s 1912 “Bloeiende Appelboom” (“Blooming Apple Tree”), a painting in the same series, the branch diameter scaling is gone, Newberry said, with a value of 5.4.

In real trees in nature, that number is usually somewhere between 1.5 and 3, depending on the tree. But in art, it’s all up to the artist and how they depicted their trees.

Piet Mondrian painted the same tree in “The gray tree” (left) and “Blooming apple tree” (right). Viewers can readily discern the tree in “The gray tree” with a branch diameter scaling exponent of 2.8.

Tableau I by Piet Mondrian, 1921. [Image: Kunstmuseum Den Haag] When I saw Mondrian’s 1911 “Gray Tree,” I immediately recognized something about trees that I had struggled to describe.

The treeless tree ‘Polder Landscape with Silhouetted Young Tree’ by Piet Mondrian, 1900-1901. Wikimedia Commons From 1890 to 1912, Mondrian painted dozens of trees.

Even abstract works of art that don't visually show branch junctions or treelike colors, such as Piet Mondrian's cubist Gray Tree, can be visually identified as trees if a realistic value for α ...

By contrast, Mondrian’s later painting, Blooming Apple Tree, which sets aside scaling in branch diameter, is not recognizable as a tree.

Piet Mondrian’s final trio of paintings was tinted by the last place the Dutch abstract artist called home: New York. Made in quick succession after World War II pushed him to move to Manhattan ...

Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, professor emerita in art history at Stanford and a scholar of American 20th-century art and fashion respectively, track that process in Mondrian’s ...

Mondrian was known for planting bizarre, forceful and one-sided kisses, some lasting 30 minutes, on women. Yet he mostly felt women got in men’s way; the feminine was “hostile to the spirit.” ...