Composition

This is one of the paintings where Mondrian's system is fully in place: a white field crossed by black lines, a few rectangles filled with red, yellow, blue and grey, and nothing in it that refers to anything outside itself. He painted it in Paris in 1921. The interesting part is how it reached Basel. It belongs to the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation, set up in 1933 by Maja Hoffmann-Stehlin, a Basel collector who had lost her husband young and kept buying the newest and most difficult art of her day. She placed her collection in the city's public museum on long-term loan, so a picture built from bare lines and three colours ended up hanging in a civic collection just as work like this was being condemned and removed from museums across the border in Germany. The canvas is small, under 50 centimetres tall, and Mondrian has weighted it so the eye settles low and to one side rather than in the middle.