Composition no.XI

This is one of a small group of paintings Mondrian built inside an oval in 1913. He set a dense web of black lines and pale ochre planes within an egg-shaped field, leaving the corners of the canvas a plainer, warmer ochre, so the composition seems to float free of the rectangle that holds it. By now the church facades and trees he had started from were almost impossible to read, and what remains is a rhythm of short horizontals and verticals, thickening towards the centre. The oval was a device painters in Paris were using at the time to soften a picture's hard corners, and Mondrian took to it, though within a year or two he abandoned it and let the grid meet the edges head-on. That warm ground outside the oval is the last real trace of an actual place left in the picture.