Composition with Color Planes 5

Mondrian was in the Netherlands when the First World War began. He had gone home to see his sick father, and as a Dutch citizen in a neutral country he could not get back to his Paris studio until 1919. Those stranded years are when his painting changed. He made this in 1917, the year Theo van Doesburg brought out the first issue of the magazine De Stijl in Leiden and gathered a few artists around a programme of straight lines and flat colour. The black grid people expect from Mondrian is not here yet. The muted rectangles float apart on the white, none of them touching, and the white between them does as much work as they do. He sold the picture the following year to Hendricus Bremmer, a Dutch critic who paid him a yearly allowance to keep painting.