Composition II avec lignes noires

In April 1930 a small gallery on the rue La Boetie in Paris hung 130 abstract works together, the opening show of the group Cercle et Carre, which Mondrian had helped found with the writer Michel Seuphor and the Uruguayan painter Joaquin Torres-Garcia. Abstraction had no settled audience in Paris yet, and much of the point of the exhibition was to demonstrate how many people were making it. Mondrian was working that year on paintings like this one, a square just over 50 centimetres across, built from one vertical and two horizontal black lines of different widths. There is no red, no blue, no yellow anywhere in it. Look at where the lines stop, just short of the canvas edge in most places, and you can see he judged those distances by eye rather than by rule.