Tableau no 1

By 1913 Mondrian had been in Paris two years, and the trees he once painted on the Gein had almost vanished into the surface. Underneath this canvas there is still a tree, drawn in and then dissolved. He had moved to Paris in 1911 to see the Cubism of Picasso and Braque for himself, and he took their way of breaking a subject into fragments, then pushed the colour down to grey, ochre and a little black. The structure gathers densely in the middle and loosens towards the edges, where the lines fade out rather than stop. Hunt for the tree and you can just make out the memory of a trunk and branches in the vertical and horizontal marks. Mondrian described a picture like this as a first step towards the unchanging reality he believed lay behind the changing forms of nature.