Composition with Blue, Yellow, and Red

On 12 March 1927 this canvas hung in an evening exhibition in Paris held by the Hollandsche Schildersvereeniging, an association of Dutch painters living in the city. In May Mondrian sent it, with three other paintings, to the Kunstausstellung Kühl, a gallery in Dresden. In a letter of 1928 he mentions selling one of the previous year's canvases to a German sculptor, a woman who had come to him with an introduction from the Hanover collector Sophie Küppers and the Russian artist El Lissitzky, and the Mondrian scholar Joop Joosten tentatively identified that canvas as this one. In 1929 it was in Frankfurt, at an exhibition about the modern chair held in the city's museum of applied art.

It is built the way he built his pictures in those years, white rectangles banded in black with smaller blocks of red, yellow and blue. Here there are two whites, subtly different from each other.

After the war it went through New York collections, and in 1949 it was lent to a Mondrian exhibition at the gallery of the dealer Sidney Janis, which owned it by 1980. In 2009 Janis's son Conrad and his wife Maria gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts, and it was the first painting by Mondrian to enter the collection.