Grid Composition 9: Checkerboard Composition, Bright Colours

In 1919 Mondrian went back to Paris. The war had kept him stranded in the neutral Netherlands for five years, and now, at 47, he returned to the city where his ideas had first loosened. This is one of two checkerboard paintings he made that year, its companion built from darker tones. The canvas is divided into a regular grid, 16 squares across and 16 down, each filled with a muted red, blue, yellow or grey. There are no heavy black lines here yet, and none of the asymmetry that would soon define him. It is Mondrian testing whether pure colour alone, laid in an even mesh, could hold a picture together. Within a year the black lines were back, and this even grid gave way to the few wide rectangles he became known for.