Composition with red, yellow, and blue

By 1927 Mondrian had spent a decade refining the style he called Neoplasticism, and here it is in its settled form. Ten years earlier, in 1917, he and a circle of Dutch painters and architects had founded the group De Stijl, arguing that painting should be pared back to straight lines, right angles and the three primary colours, red, yellow and blue, along with black, white and grey. In this canvas a large white field is crossed by a few black lines that stop just short of the edge, so the coloured blocks read as though the pattern carries on beyond what you can see. He would adjust such paintings for weeks, shifting a line or resizing a block until the balance satisfied him, with no colour and no direction allowed to take over. Restorers have since found that he built the whites up in layers of lead and zinc paint to get a flat, even surface.