A key principle of De Stijl was the effort to distill the elements of an art into their most fundamental forms, then reintegrate those elements into a new entity. Van der Leck was the first De Stijl artist to attempt this with color, limiting his work's palette to the primary colors, black, and white—a practice later adopted by Piet Mondrian. This gouache-and-pencil drawing of 1917 was one of Van der Leck’s earliest works using this approach.
Gallery label from Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013.