Composition with Blue and Yellow

By 1932 Mondrian had spent more than a decade paring painting down to almost nothing, just black lines, a white ground, and the three primary colours. He had been in Paris since the early 1920s, refining the system he called Neoplasticism, and for years the lines in his grids mostly ran single. Around the time of this canvas he began doubling them, letting two close black bars travel together across the surface, which quietly shifts the rhythm of the whole thing. Look to the upper right, where the crossing lines split the field into a handful of unequal rectangles, only two of them filled with colour, in blue and yellow. He weighed those blocks against each other for a long time before settling, adjusting the proportions so that no two shapes repeat and yet nothing tips out of balance.