Composizione in linea, secondo stato

Mondrian had been working in Paris when the First World War broke out in 1914, and a visit home left him stranded in the neutral Netherlands for the duration. In those years he pushed his art down to almost nothing. This near-square canvas from 1916 and 1917 carries only short black strokes, thicker at the centre and thinning toward the edges, floating on white. They began as something you could still read, the piers and jetties and waves he had drawn at the seaside town of Domburg, boiled down here until the sea itself is gone and only a rhythm of marks remains. The coloured rectangles and heavy grids that the world now files under his name were still a few years off. In 1916 his world was black on white.