Piet Mondrian's Still Life with Gingerpot II (1912) Crewneck Sweatshirt

For more than a decade after graduating from art school in 1897, Piet Mondrian created naturalistic drawings and paintings that reflect a succession of stylistic influences including academic realism, Dutch Impressionism, and Symbolism. During this period and intermittently until the mid-1920s Mondrian created more than a hundred pictures of flowers. Reflecting years later on his attraction to the subject, he wrote, “I enjoyed painting flowers, not bouquets, but a single flower at a time, in order that I might better express its plastic structure.” The heavy crooked line of Chrysanthemum suggests Mondrian’s debt to Post-Impressionism, specifically the work of Vincent van Gogh. In 1909 Mondrian became interested in theosophy, a type of philo