Composition with Gray Lines

Mondrian went home to the Netherlands in July 1914 to see his sick father, and the war closed the border behind him. He spent the next five years at Laren, a village of artists outside Amsterdam, arguing with Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg about how far a painting could be stripped down, and in 1917 Van Doesburg started the magazine De Stijl with them. This canvas comes from the end of that stay. In 1918 Mondrian took a square canvas and stood it on its corner while leaving the lines inside it horizontal and vertical, so that the edge now crosses the grid at 45 degrees and the grey lines run off the picture instead of closing it in. The square is 84.5 centimetres on a side and 121 from corner to corner. In June 1919 he gave up the Laren house and went back to Paris.