Composition with colour fields

When war broke out in the summer of 1914, Mondrian was visiting the Netherlands and could not get back to Paris, where he had been living. He sat out the war in the neutral Netherlands, much of it in Laren, an artists' village near Amsterdam, where he got to know the painter Bart van der Leck. Van der Leck was then breaking his pictures down into flat patches of colour on white. Mondrian later said it was van der Leck who turned him toward colour, and this canvas from 1917 shows that turn. The dark lines of his earlier work have gone, and rectangles of pink, yellow and pale blue float on the white with clean edges. The colours are still softened, a step short of the pure red, yellow and blue that came later. That same year Mondrian, van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg launched the magazine De Stijl. Mondrian painted the frame as well, so that it joins the picture, and in 1928 the collector A.P. van Hoey Smith gave the painting to the Boijmans.