Composizione 10 in bianco e nero

Mondrian had been building his career in Paris, but he was back visiting the Netherlands in the summer of 1914 when the First World War broke out, and the fighting kept him from returning. He spent much of the war in his neutral homeland, some of it by the sea at Domburg, drawing the wooden breakwaters that run out into the water. This painting grew out of those sketches, and it is the first in which he used only black and white. The short horizontal marks across the middle are the swell of the waves, and the verticals below are what is left of a pier reaching into the sea. The starting point is still a real place, yet the water and the jetty have almost dissolved into a field of small crossing lines.