Composition de lignes et couleur: III

In July 1937 the Nazis opened their exhibition of so-called degenerate art in Munich, and work by Mondrian was among the modern pictures hung there to be mocked. He was living in Paris, and this canvas comes from the same year. Almost all of it is black lines on white. The only colour is a small blue rectangle low on the right, which the museum in The Hague describes as the anchor for all the movement around it. Toward the right edge the lines crowd together, some of them doubled, leaving narrow white strips between them. The white itself is worked. In earlier pictures he had varied his whites with faint tints. Here he laid on bright white in several layers, brushing in different directions. In 1938, feeling less and less safe in Paris, he moved to London. The Hague bought the painting from a London dealer in 1967, with help from the Rembrandt Association, a Dutch society that funds museum purchases.