Komposition in Farbe A

Mondrian painted this in 1917, the same year he and a few others in neutral Holland launched the movement and magazine they called De Stijl. The First World War had cut him off from Paris and thrown these Dutch artists together, and they set out to strip painting down to something they hoped was universal. This canvas is a step along that road rather than the destination. The reds, blues and ochres are still muted, and the coloured rectangles float free, overlapping or sitting side by side with short black lines and no fixed grid to hold them. The white around them is not empty background but an active part of the picture. The tight black-lined grids most people picture as a Mondrian were still a couple of years away.