Komposition II in Rot, Blau und Gelb

Mondrian painted this in Paris in 1930, more than ten years into a project he had set himself: to strip painting down to nothing but straight black lines, the three primary colours, and white. He had lived through the arrival of abstraction and decided representation was finished for him. So there is no landscape here, no figure, no reference to anything you could name. A thick black grid divides the square, and a single large block of red fills most of the upper right, balanced against small notes of blue and yellow at the edges. The picture is only about 18 inches on each side. Mondrian adjusted the weight and placement of these blocks for years across dozens of canvases, chasing a balance he felt rather than measured.