Composition 7: Light Color Planes with Grey Contours

When Mondrian painted this in 1919 he had just returned to Paris. He had gone back to the Netherlands in 1914 to see his ailing father, and the war then closed the border and kept him there for five years. The canvas he made on his return is almost square, about 50 centimetres a side, and divided into a soft lattice of small rectangles. Each is a slightly different shade of off-white and pale grey, boxed in by thin grey lines. There is barely any colour. The grid does not quite line up, so the eye keeps sliding across it hunting for a centre that is not there. Within a year or two those grey lines would harden into black bars and the pale planes would fill with flat red, yellow and blue. Here the lines are still grey, and the strongest colour in the whole picture is a marginally warmer white.