Composition

Mondrian came back to the Netherlands in the summer of 1914 to see his sick father, expecting to be in his Paris studio again within weeks. The war closed the border and he did not get back until 1919. He sat out most of those five years in Laren, a village of artists east of Amsterdam, where he fell in with the painter Bart van der Leck, who had already cut his palette down to the three primary colours, and with the younger Theo van Doesburg. This canvas belongs to the middle of that stranded stretch. Short black bars hang on a pale ground with only a few muted patches of colour left among them, the residue of the church fronts and sea piers he had been abstracting before the war. In 1917, the year after he painted it, he and van Doesburg founded the magazine De Stijl.