Composition with red, blue, black, yellow and grey

In 1921 Mondrian was back in Paris, short of money and painting small canvases like this one, barely 40 centimetres high. A red bar sits in the top corner, a blue strip runs down the right edge, a yellow block lies along the bottom, and the rest is black lines and planes of white and pale grey. His most faithful buyer was in Holland. Sal Slijper, a broker from the artists' village of Laren, had befriended him during the First World War, when Mondrian was stuck in the Netherlands, and in 1922 he joined a small group paying the rent on Mondrian's Paris studio in return for work. When Germany occupied the Netherlands, Slijper, who was Jewish, hid on his own property, while his Mondrians lay packed in newspaper under old carpets in a neighbour's attic. He left them all to the museum in The Hague, and this canvas is among the latest of them.