Composición con rojo, amarillo y azul

Mondrian began this grid of black lines and primary blocks in Paris in 1937, and it travelled with him through the war. As the danger spread he moved to London in 1938, then sailed for New York in 1940, after the bombing reached England. He kept reworking the canvas as he went and completed it in Manhattan around 1942. By then he had spent decades paring painting down to straight lines and blocks of red, yellow and blue, convinced that this stripped-down order pointed to something universal beneath the visible world. Tate acquired the finished picture in 1964.