Trafalgar Square

Mondrian left Paris for London in September 1938, the month of the Munich agreement, and took a studio in Hampstead. He began this picture there. When the bombing of London started in 1940 he sailed for New York, and the stretcher behind the canvas is inscribed 39 to 43, so he was still altering it three years after leaving the square it is named for. It was the first of several paintings he titled after cities that took him in. The small planes of red, blue and yellow sit inside their black lines more tightly and more irregularly than in the Paris canvases, and he was still working on it within months of his death in New York in 1944.