Is Mondrian’s Art Public Domain? Start with the Exact Work

Short answer: Start with the individual Mondrian, not a blanket yes or no. Cleveland supplies CC0 files for the two works shown here: Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (1927) and Field with Young Trees in the Foreground (about 1907). Mondrian’s ordinary EU and UK author term has expired. This guide does not independently establish the U.S. publication histories of these paintings or clear every image bearing his name.

Piet Mondrian lived from 1872 to 1944. His black lines and primary-colour rectangles are instantly recognisable, but they are only part of his work. Landscapes, individual drawings, late compositions and modern products described as “Mondrian-inspired” need to be kept apart.

Which red, yellow and blue?

The opening image is Cleveland’s 1927 painting, accession 1967.215. Its full title is Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue. Those colour words recur in Mondrian titles, so they are not a reliable identifier by themselves. This is the Cleveland painting, not an unspecified composition from 1930.

The canvas is only 49.5 centimetres square. A broad white space occupies most of it, while the colour gathers around the edges: two red areas at upper left, a thin yellow strip at right and a low blue rectangle. The black lines do not divide it into a regular chequerboard. Some spaces are narrow, others expansive.

Look at the blue rectangle along the bottom. Its weight is balanced by the reds above it, but they are not mirror images. That uneven balance is more interesting than the shorthand “straight lines plus three colours.” It gives the eye somewhere to travel instead of presenting a repeating pattern.

The museum identifies the narrow grey wooden strips as Mondrian’s original frame. The photograph retains them, along with the slight shadow underneath. This matters when choosing an image for an article: trimming everything outside the painted field would remove something that belongs to the object’s presentation, not just a distracting modern wall.

A landscape before the grid

Piet Mondrian, Field with Young Trees in the Foreground, about 1907. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Frank Stella, 1971.220. Object record and CC0 image.

This earlier landscape is oil on paper laid on board, not a geometric canvas. Cleveland connects it with the countryside around Oele in the eastern Netherlands, where Mondrian spent time in summer 1907.

The thin trunks interrupt a broad strip of sky. Branches gather into dark clusters, while green strokes near the bottom suggest a field rather than describing every blade of grass. A small pink opening at the right keeps the horizon from becoming one continuous dark band.

You can compare its upright trees and low horizontal divisions with the later composition. That is a useful visual exercise, not proof that every tree was destined to become a black line. The loose handling, muted colour and uneven patches belong to this particular landscape and deserve attention on their own.

The two museum files show why an artist guide should not rely on one famous style. A search result that labels any brown landscape “early Mondrian” still needs an object record. Conversely, a red-blue-yellow pattern on a modern bag may be a new design rather than a reproduction of an identified painting.

Twelve different records

The table gathers twelve exact objects. The two Cleveland images are displayed here; the other ten are research links, not a cleared image pack. Dates follow the holding institutions, including their uncertainty. A provider’s public-domain flag describes its assessment and supplied material, not our independent reconstruction of first publication.

Work and institutional record	Recorded date	What to keep separate
Lozenge Composition with Yellow, Black, Blue, Red, and Gray	1921	A diamond-shaped composition, not the Cleveland square canvas.
Farm near Duivendrecht	About 1916	A distinct landscape, Chicago 2001.479.
Composition (No. 1) Gray-Red	1935	Chicago flags this record public domain; independent U.S. reasoning unresolved here.
Landzicht Farm: Compositional Study	About 1905	A study, not a substitute file for another farm picture.
Study for a Composition	1940–41	Later study; retain its individual object record.
Geinrust Farm: Close Frontal View	About 1905–06	Different farm and viewpoint.
Amsterdam Skyline Viewed from the West	About 1899	A named city view rather than an abstract grid.
Windmill with Summerhouse II	About 1906	Met record; no open image acquired here.
Tableau	1921	Met 1999.363.57, not the Chicago lozenge.
Untitled (River Landscape with Bridge)	About 1897–1907	Broad dating retained; no guessed single year.
Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue	1927	Illustrated Cleveland CC0 file.
Field with Young Trees in the Foreground	About 1907	Illustrated Cleveland CC0 file.

Why the country matters

For Mondrian’s own paintings, the ordinary EU life-plus-70 calculation runs from his death in 1944 through the end of 2014. The UK’s ordinary artistic-work term also uses life plus seventy years. This is an ordinary author-term conclusion, not a statement that national exceptions, moral rights or newly arising publication rights never matter.

U.S. dates work differently. The Copyright Office’s current duration circular identifies works published in the United States before January 1, 1931 as public domain. A canvas painted in 1927 is not automatically evidence of publication in 1927. Foreign publication, registration and a work’s previously unpublished status can affect the route to an answer.

For example, section 303 gives some qualifying older, previously unpublished works a minimum term through 2047 when publication occurred by the end of 2002. That is a conditional rule, not a claim that every posthumously reproduced Mondrian is protected until 2047.

A later date is not an automatic no

It is tempting to reverse the cutoff and declare everything made after 1930 protected. That is also too crude. Chicago’s record for Composition (No. 1) Gray-Red, dated 1935, carries a public-domain flag in the museum’s current collection data. This guide reports that designation without inventing a renewal, publication or other legal history to explain it.

At the other end, the Met records linked above do not supply us with an approved open image simply because their objects are earlier. Provider policies and underlying copyright are related checks, not interchangeable answers.

A celebrated late work such as Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–43, therefore needs its own research. MoMA’s image is not one of the files reproduced here. The painting also shows why chronology matters artistically: its small coloured segments create a different rhythm from the thick continuous black lines in the Cleveland composition.

Using the image without changing the work

Cleveland’s Open Access policy applies CC0 to designated images and data, including the two selected records. Save the object number, exact file link and rights statement with the image. Do not treat that permission as a museum endorsement of your product or extend it to someone else’s photograph.

Check orientation before making a layout. A lozenge painting should not be turned into a square merely because a thumbnail slot is square. Preserve the narrow colour strips in the 1927 composition; an aggressive crop could remove the yellow entirely and leave readers with a different balance of colour.

Finally, distinguish a faithful reproduction from a new design. The closer a caption stays to the actual object—title, date, medium, collection and source—the easier it is to see what is genuinely Mondrian, what the museum supplied, and what a modern designer has added.