Composition no. I

By 1929 Mondrian had been painting these grids for close to a decade, and he had been stripping them down as he went. This one sets only two things against the white: black lines and a single red. There is no yellow and no blue, which is why it carries the plain title of red and black. He has pushed the heavier elements towards the edges and left a large empty white area in the middle, so most of the canvas is doing very little and a small amount of weight at the borders holds the whole thing in balance. That emptiness was deliberate. He spent long stretches shifting a line a few millimetres or repainting a black band until the tension between the parts felt right to him. The red is the only warm note in an otherwise black-and-white picture.