Composition with color planes and gray lines 3

By 1917 Mondrian and a few allies, chief among them the painter Theo van Doesburg, had launched De Stijl, a magazine and a movement arguing that art should be built from the simplest possible elements. This is what that idea looked like mid-experiment. A regular lattice of thin grey lines runs across the canvas, and the colour sits inside it in soft, washed rectangles of blue, pink and ochre that barely raise their voice. There is no black yet, and none of the strong red, yellow and blue he would soon settle on. He was testing whether an even, almost mechanical grid could hold a picture together. Within a couple of years he decided it was too rigid and loosened it again.