Composition n° III

Mondrian got back to Paris in 1919, after the war had stranded him in the Netherlands for five years, and within two years he had settled on the format he would keep for the rest of his life, a white field with black lines and blocks of red, yellow and blue. This canvas comes from that first run of them in 1921 and is small, about 49 centimetres square. The museum's record notes that he went back into it and repainted it in 1925. That was the year he broke with De Stijl, the Dutch group he had helped start, because its editor Theo van Doesburg began tilting the lines to 45 degrees and Mondrian would work only with horizontals and verticals. The Phillips Collection in Washington bought the painting in 1946.