Composition 8

Mondrian had been in Paris about two years when he painted this, working in a studio on the rue du Depart beside Montparnasse station, in a quarter being pulled down and rebuilt around him. The grids of his 1914 canvases start from what demolition leaves standing. Exposed party walls, the lines of vanished floors, chimney flues running up the flank of a building that no longer has a neighbour. He kept the proportions and dropped everything that said brick. In July 1914 he went back to the Netherlands to see his sick father, and the war closed the border behind him. He spent the next five years at home, worked the grid down to straight lines and three primary colours, and did not see the rue du Depart again until 1919.