Komposition in Farbe B

When Mondrian painted this in 1917, he was stuck in the Netherlands. He had crossed over to visit family in 1914, war broke out across Europe, and neutral Holland was where he waited it out while the fighting ground on past the border. That same autumn a young painter named Theo van Doesburg started a small magazine called De Stijl, and Mondrian became one of its first voices. You can watch him working something out in this canvas. Rectangles of soft color, pinks and a blue and an ochre, float on a pale ground and stay slightly apart. The heavy black lines that would later lock those colors into a grid are simply not here yet.