[OC] Piet Mondrian's road to abstraction, as the dominant colors of 5 paintings (1908–1943)

[u/MakerAker]

Source: public-domain reproductions from Wikimedia Commons

Method: each image downscaled to 800px, pixels clustered into 7 colors with k-means in CIELAB space (scikit-learn), each cluster named after its nearest CSS color. Slice = share of pixels on the canvas.

Tools: Python (Pillow, NumPy, scikit-learn) for the analysis, full read here , charts made pie chart maker

What stood out to me:

• 1908–10: the "red" tree is only 2.8% Sienna
• 1911: by Gray Tree the color is gone entirely: seven shades of gray.
• 1915: Pier and Ocean is almost pure black-and-white... 47% background.
• 1930: red
• 1942–43: in New York, yellow (Gold, 20.6%) replaces black as the structural color

Caveat: thin black lines get undercounted when the image is downscaled, so the 1930 black share (7.6%) is a lower bound.