Composition 9 with Black, White, Yellow and Red

Mondrian began this canvas in London in 1939. He had moved there from Paris the autumn before, worried that Germany would invade France, and set up a studio in Hampstead. In 1940, with German bombs falling on London, he left for New York and took his unfinished paintings with him. The two dates the Phillips Collection gives it, 1939 to 1942, mark it as one of that group, begun in Europe and finished or reworked in Manhattan. The Phillips describes thin black lines, many of them running in close pairs, balanced across wide fields of white. The colour is kept near the edges, one large block of yellow and four small red bars. The painting later belonged to Katherine Dreier, an American painter who in 1920 had founded the Société Anonyme with Marcel Duchamp to collect and show modern art, and it came to the Phillips from her estate in 1953.