Composition: Light Color Planes with Grey Lines

In 1919 Mondrian was living in Laren, a village of artists east of Amsterdam, waiting out the last of his wartime exile before he could return to Paris that summer. This painting comes from just before the move. It is laid out as an even grid of squares and rectangles, but the colour is barely present, soft whites and creams, with grey the only real colour, drawing the lines that divide the cells. He was working through the arithmetic of it, splitting the surface into a regular mosaic and then varying the weight of each part. Within a year or two he would drop this quiet checkerboard for the scheme everyone now knows, wide white fields, heavy black lines and blocks of red, yellow and blue. These even mosaics belong to a brief moment around 1918 and 1919, and he painted only a handful of them.