Rautenkomposition mit Gelb, Schwarz, Blau, Rot und Grau

By 1921 Mondrian had settled on the vocabulary he would keep for the rest of his life. Straight black lines, only horizontal and vertical, a few blocks of red, yellow and blue, and the rest held in white and grey. Here he tilts the whole thing onto its corner. The canvas is a square stood up as a diamond, so the black grid, still strictly upright within it, runs off the slanted edges after only a short distance, as though the picture were a fragment cut from something larger. He was in Paris then, working near the Dutch circle he had helped found, De Stijl, who held that art pared back to these bare elements could stand for a calmer, more balanced world after the war. Inside the diamond the bars stay level and plumb, crossing a few times off to one side and leaving most of the surface plain white.