Two arum lilies

Real arum lilies are white. Mondrian painted his blue. This canvas from 1918 is at least his third go at the flower, and all three versions are in the museum in The Hague. The first, from around 1908, is a single bloom built out of dabs of blue and orange, in the bright divisionist colour he was trying out at the time. A second, from about 1910, pairs two lilies in pale blue ringed with yellow. By 1918 he was living in Laren, an artists' village near Amsterdam, and his abstract canvases that year were down to grey lines on pale grounds. The lilies here have gone paler and looser too. One rides high on a long, wavering stem, the other sits low in the left corner, each with a short yellow spike at its heart, over a ground of streaky vertical strokes in blue and cream.