Composition en rouge, bleu et blanc II

Mondrian painted this in Paris in 1937, near the end of the two decades he spent there refining one idea. By now his vocabulary was fixed — black lines, white ground, and a few blocks of primary colour — and the interest lies in how little he needed to make it feel balanced without being symmetrical. A single red and a single blue sit off toward the edges while the white does most of the work. Within two years he would leave a tense, rearming Europe for London, and then for New York, where these austere grids loosened into the bright pulse of his final pictures. Here the black bands are still crisp and the surface calm.