Composición n.º 1 con gris y rojo 1938 / Composición con rojo 1939

In September 1938 Mondrian, 66 and long settled in Paris, packed up and crossed to London, uneasy about the war he could feel coming. He took rooms in Hampstead, on a street already full of modern artists like the painter Ben Nicholson and the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and carried on with the only thing he made now: black lines on white, a few blocks of pure colour, arranged toward a balance he never quite called done. Here a single red block sits low on the right, held against a wide field of white and one bar of grey. The canvas even carries two dates. He began it in 1938, came back to it in 1939, and let both years stand in its title rather than pretend it arrived in one sitting.