Compositie in lijn

During the First World War Mondrian was stranded in the neutral Netherlands, unable to get back to Paris. He spent part of that time on the coast at Domburg and Scheveningen, drawing the sea and the wooden breakwaters that ran out into it. Out of those drawings came paintings made only of short horizontal and vertical strokes, the horizontals standing for the roll of the waves, the verticals for the piers. He began this one in 1916 and reworked it into its final state in 1917, and by then the sea has gone completely, leaving only black marks hovering on white. Seen in the museum rather than in a reproduction, those strokes turn out to be painted in two slightly different blacks, one a touch warmer than the other, a difference no photograph ever carries.