Composition in oval with color panes 2

In the spring of 1914 Mondrian was living on the rue du Départ in Paris, right beside the Montparnasse station, and was too short of money to travel home for his own first solo show in the Netherlands. He posted about 15 recent canvases to the critic H. P. Bremmer in The Hague instead, and this oval was not one of them. Its starting point was just around the corner. Buildings in the area were being pulled down, leaving bare side walls covered in huge painted advertisements, one for the liqueur maker Cusenier and one for Kub stock cubes. Mondrian flattened that wall into a lattice of colour planes, and at the lower right he kept three of its letters, KUB, the kind of street lettering Picasso and Braque were putting into their pictures at the time. That July he went back to the Netherlands to see his family, war broke out, and he stayed there until 1919.